Citrix SD-WAN [EOL] Reviews

In managing a retail network with over a hundred branches, we moved from MPLS to Citrix SD-WAN for cost savings and flexibility. Citrix seamlessly combines Internet and MPLS, enabling us to eliminate MPLS. This shift lets us use different Internet providers at each branch while maintaining performance. The centralized monitoring and easy deployment make our network operations more efficient.

Citrix has made my work easier and more cost-effective. It lowered our Internet costs and gave me the flexibility to choose providers based on each location's connectivity. Unlike before, I'm not tied to a specific provider. The central deployment feature allows easy configuration updates for all boxes from the head office, streamlining network management. This simplification has been a big plus for our operations.

The only improvement for Citrix SD-WAN would be to lower its cost.

I have using Citrix SD-WAN for two years.

I would rate the stability of the solution as a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Citrix SD-WAN as an eight out of ten. It depends on the expansion rates and the specific box configurations. In my company, there are three users, including myself, who are working with Citrix SD-WAN.

While the support is good, the area that needs improvement is the speed of resolution. We can log tickets, but it takes a good amount of time to receive feedback and a resolution. Enhancing the speed of support responses would significantly improve the overall support experience for users like me.

Before using Citrix SD-WAN, I had experience with VDI, particularly with virtualized desktop solutions like Citrix Workspace. We chose Citrix SD-WAN because our previous solution wasn't working well in our environment.

I would rate the easiness of the initial setup as a seven out of ten. The initial setup of Citrix SD-WAN took time, but deploying to new branches now only takes three to ten minutes. The process is straightforward, and one person is enough. I handle the deployment on the master control node, sending the configuration to the person at the other end to upload. It is a quick and simple process.

It is on the expensive side. I would give it an eight out of ten in terms of costliness. In my region, the approximate cost for the Citrix SD-WAN license is around $150 per user per year. However, the master box comes at a much higher cost.

Overall, I would rate Citrix SD-WAN as seven out of ten.

We are using it for our MCN controller. We have two controls in our data center; 510 branches have the Citrix Cloud. We are using kind of half an equipment of SD-WAN.

We are using it widely for the local record for SaaS-based applications. Another valuable feature is a local breakout.

There are a few things that can be improved, are domain-based routing and the slowness of virtual parts, and it may be due to the wrong configuration, which we have been unable to find out. Previously, we faced some issues with the slowness part. Apart from that, feature like end gateway level antivirus. We are currently using a NetFlow proxy to establish a virtual position for the NetFlow. Our current environment has many use cases, but we are not using them on the Citrix SD-WAN.

When I navigate the NCL part, it involves configuration. I want to highlight this disadvantage. Sometimes, when we push the configuration, it tries to push it to all branch locations. This process takes a lot of time, nearly 30 minutes, to push a single change from the NCL. Overall, I don't think Citrix meets our use cases what we have. This is based on my feedback after using it for the past year and working on this Citrix SD-WAN. However, from my experience, it is the worst solution I have seen.

There's no domain-based routing, which is horrible. That's why we are moving to other products. We have checked our use case requirements with Fortinet, Palo Alto, and they meet them. I will consider the PoC or another OEM.

There are many things in the area you need to be prompt, like the automation part. If any link or device goes down, alerting notification, etc. We need to perform and highlight so many things to your management. This should be improved.

We have been using Citrix SD-WAN for the last one and a half years. We are using version 11.4.1.27

I have been working on this Citrix SD-WAN solution since last year but haven't seen any issues. It appears to be a stable solution for us. 

We have 510 branches, and we have extended it to 525. In total, 15 branches were added this year.

We extensively use Citrix SD-WAN.

We use technical support, but it's of poor quality. Sometimes, when I call during payment situations, we have to wait for one and a half hours. For example, we faced an issue in one of our branches that almost lost access and access limitations. We contacted Citrix, but it took them nearly an hour to come on the call and understand the issue. However, while they were joining the call, the issue resolved itself.

The initial setup was complex for me.

We have nearly 7-8 resources who manage the 500 branches. We have that much staff to maintain this infrastructure.

Citrix SD-WAN is expensive and has a yearly subscription.

We are not satisfied with this product. The main issue is that we haven't been able to navigate it yet how to apply. We are looking for application-based routing and domain-based routing. We lack knowledge on how to accomplish this. Additionally, we are an event center, and we are currently in the process of deploying the SDN center to monitor all 510 sites. There are a few requirements, such as application-based routing, domain-based routing, and stack-based application, to give local breakout. Currently, Microsoft Office and Outlook traffic are routed to the Internet breakout. However, if we want to implement domain-based routing, we would like any users in our branch to access Google through this specific local breakout. These are the kind of solutions we are looking for.

The use case requirement is to secure SD-WAN to protect our branches. Everywhere we have the local breakout. In every branch, we must ensure security by enabling features like gateway-level antivirus, content filtering, and web-based filtering. These kinds of features are not available in Citrix, like content filtering.

Overall, I'll rate the solution a five out of ten.

In the South African environment, which is likely the same internationally as well, the MPLS is prohibitively expensive for clients, and it doesn't really give them the flexibility and the performance that they need. We found that with most of our clients being able to use off-the-shelf bandwidth products, it dramatically drives down their cost and gives them the control back they need. If there are performance issues, they pick it up fairly quickly, and they don't need to log a call with the ISP to go and look at what's wrong. They can control their own application quality of service and have a better view of their application performance than they would with an ISP managing their network.

There's no one specific feature that stands out. It's just the amount of application reliability that they get out of the solution. It ranks the highest, especially when you start looking at video and voice traffic across the network. The way the SD-WAN functions and handles traffic across links makes it a lot better. The user experience is great, and the voice and video performance is more reliable and offers better quality.

It's an easy solution to implement. 

The solution is stable. 

It is scalable. 

The SD-WAN solution as it is already is quite feature-rich and the upgrade process is very simple. 

Even though the monitoring is pretty good, there is some room for improvement there.

Technical support could be better. They need more knowledgeable people.

There isn't anything that I've come across that I would add to the solution. It's quite comprehensive already.

I've used the solution for seven years or so. 

The solution is very stable. I haven't had one outage in any of our SD-WAN environments. That's obviously taking WAN links out of the equation. The appliances themselves are super stable. We haven't had any appliances crash or anything like that. We've had one or two where there's been power damage. However, those environment variables are at play. Still, from a stability point of view, it's very stable.

The scalability of the solution is very easy.

We have 5,000 or 6,000 users on the solution right now. 

I've reached out to support in the past. 

This is one area where Citrix can focus and drive improvement. The level of support from Citrix is not that great. The level of service that you receive depends on the skill level of the engineer that you're in contact with. More often than not, it's very hit-and-miss. Sometimes you get an excellent engineer, and more often than not, you get someone that doesn't really know what they are talking about.

As a service provider, the expectation from us is that when we contact Citrix for support, the engineer's skill level should be higher than the skill level or support we can provide.

It's often a scenario where we know more than what Citrix's support engineers know. It's usually a case of case escalation to get the right skills on the case. From an SD-WAN point of view, we've only logged one call over the last three or four years. On the other hand, we've logged a couple of issues on the ADC side.

The initial setup is  pretty easy. You don't need to be a high-level network engineer to be able to deploy infrastructure on the SD-WAN side.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the size of the environment. That said, the setup time is fairly quick.

Clients have seen an ROI. For example, we do SD-WAN solutions for an online gambling company in South Africa, and we migrated them off MPLS onto our SD-WAN solution, and they're saving millions every month. They are just purely savings on MPLS spend.

There are a couple of licensing options depending on the hardware SKU that you're dropping at the customer premises. We've got throughput licensing, so 20 MB, 100 MB, 200, 300, 400 MB, all the way up to 6 GB per second. Depending on the size of the branch, that's how we would license it. Then you also have something that we call a platform license, where we've got the standard, advanced, and premium options. Depending on that platform license, it unlocks different sets of functionality.

It is definitely worth the price. 

We're service providers, so we manage a bunch of client environments, so we run multiple versions across the entire fleet of client systems. We don't use SD-WAN ourselves. It is just one of the products that we offer.

We're a Citrix platinum plus partner. That's the highest level of Citrix partnership that you can achieve. We function at a partner level as well as a reseller. More often than not, we'll engage with clients through the whole supply chain. Therefore, we'll spec their environment, we'll source the hardware for them, and then do the implementation. On top of that, we can handle training for onsite technicians and those kinds of things.

We have some clients that run SD-WAN on-prem, and then we've got a couple that runs in the public cloud as well, specifically Azure.

The important thing to look at for new users is the number of branches involved and the type of applications running across that network. Obviously, applications in our world are what make the world go around. Understanding the types of traffic that are traversing your network is probably step one in looking at an SD-WAN solution.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten purely for ease of use. The performance you get from the product, and its reliability are great. We've got fairly large-scale deployments, and we very, very rarely receive support calls for issues or anything like that.

The product just does what it does. It allows customers to focus on their core business rather than worry about the network's doing.

We are an HR service provider in Belgium. We have 60 offices in Belgium, and we basically use the SD-WAN setup to be more efficient with our WAN and with our spending, with regard to connectivity.

We are not using its latest version. I know we need to do an upgrade. So, it is the version before the latest one.

Citrix SD-WAN helps us in re-routing certain traffic, for example, local internet breakouts for Office 365. It also helps us to be more agile when we are opening new offices or when we are moving locations. We have deployed a config that is zero-touch. So, we can very quickly ship hardware devices to the correct locations and be up and running with internet lines in no time.

The zero-touch deployment is most valuable for us.

The communication around the life cycle would have been really helpful. The main issue we have had is related to the life cycle because some of the things that we are using were discontinued. They were discontinued within a year after we had purchased it, which is a bit painful. If we had known that, we would've made some other decisions.

Reverse compatibility between different versions would also be helpful.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It is stable. 

Scalability is not at all a problem. In terms of its users, for connectivity over the WAN, we have between 1,900 to 2,000 users. For administrating, there are three people.

I have not personally interacted with them, but my team did. We did a project together with Citrix.

It doesn't seem very difficult. It is easier than a traditional setup in terms of getting it deployed, but it is a little bit more complex in terms of running it. So, troubleshooting for our engineers is a little bit more complex.

It depends on the scale. In our case, it would have been better if we had known about the life cycling steps, but otherwise, it is worth the money.

We did a comparison between different solutions, and we used a methodology from Gartner to make the decision. The decision was to go with Citrix SD-WAN because it had the best score on most of our non-negotiable items. We had listed some objectives, and we scored all different solutions against our objectives. One of the parameters was cost, but it was not the only parameter. Citrix SD-WAN came out as the best solution for us.

I would advise using Citrix professional services to have your design validated. We got a lot of value out of the discussions that we had with Citrix. We have a bit of an atypical setup. Usually, SD-WAN is deployed over two DSL lines, where we chose to have MPLS and DSL combined, and it really helped that we had help from Citrix themselves.

I would rate it an 8 out of 10. If we are in a situation today where we need to make a decision on which solution we are going to implement, I do believe that we would go for Citrix again. I would recommend Citrix to keep doing what they are doing, but they should be a little bit more open on what the plan is with Citrix SD-WAN. We have heard some rumors that they will discontinue the product, and that, of course, would be a pity.

The solution's most valuable feature is load balancing. You can have load balancing and security-related features combined within Netceler. The firewall is being configured within NetScaler itself. Citrix SD-WAN is a one-stop solution that provides users with remote access to your corporate environment.

The solution's licensing model could be improved. Citrix SD-WAN is a good product from a technical point of view. However, when you compare its licensing with the prices of competitors, you will see that there are many different options.

Citrix SD-WAN is an enterprise-grade solution.

If a customer already has Citrix NetScaler and is not looking to change anything in their existing environment, we proceed with Citrix SD-WAN. However, if a customer is looking for a change because of a pricing issue, we can recommend different solutions like Palo Alto.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We have a discreet device associated with our mobile purchase, allowing us to establish a VPN. This enables us to securely log in remotely by utilizing the 3.3 certificate server that we have already procured. It offers versatility for various purposes, including managing the entire balance sheet or publishing any product.

It provides the flexibility to handle multiple functions. It allows us to use additional VPNs, offering more options compared to other VPN solutions.

Enhancements are needed to improve the stability.

We have been using it for a few months.

I would rate the stability six out of ten.

Scalability is not an issue, but it should be further improved.

Tech support faced challenges in resolving simple issues, taking an extended amount of time for their resolution. I would rate it six out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward.

It serves as a licensed registered agent, requiring annual renewal. We opted for a five-year license, and it's not an economical product. The price is relatively expensive.

Overall, I would rate it six out of ten.

Citrix SD-WAN can be implemented either on-premises or in the cloud. You have the option to set it up as a physical appliance within your environment, or as a virtual machine subscription through Citrix or one of its partners. If you have VMware servers or a VxRail in your environment, you can order Citrix SD-WAN from Citrix or one of its partners and deploy it as a VM on your virtual machine.

You have the option to set up multiple sites in different locations within the same environment. This can be achieved by creating secure tunnels between the sites using Citrix SD-WAN's user interface license, which allows you to customize data and prioritize your needs. For example, you can ensure the quality of service for specific applications like team applications, even with multiple connections, through the solution's load-balancing capabilities. This leads to accelerated business operations and enhanced performance.

The most valuable feature of Citrix SD-WAN is customization. You are able to customize the solution to your needs.

Citrix SD-WAN does not have the SD-WAN with one optimization in a single license. Other competitors have this option and it should be added to this solution.

In the next release of the solution, it could be more user-friend and easier to use for IT managers to do troubleshooting.

I have used Citrix SD-WAN within the last 12 months.

We have deployed this solution for 16 sites and we have not had any issues with the stability.

Bandwidth utilization can be optimized using Citrix SD-WAN. For customers who have limited speed on their main connection, this can lead to issues. However, Citrix SD-WAN can solve this problem by load balancing the main connection and bandwidth. Additionally, for customers with limited bandwidth, optimization can also be achieved through Citrix SD-WAN.

The initial setup of the solution is simple.

We have a team that does the implementation of the solution.

It would be helpful to have a demo license available for customers who want to prove the concept and conduct a proof of concept (POC) before committing to the solution. This is particularly important for customers in Egypt who often require a demonstration of the solution's features and compatibility with their needs before making any investment or incurring costs. Providing a demo license would allow customers to assess whether the solution would meet their needs or not.

There is a variety of licensing options from the vendor.

I rate Citrix SD-WAN a seven out of ten.

We are helping our customers create secure and redundant networks. That's the primary use case.

It’s helped my clients. For example, we did multiple roll-outs. The other banks, bank branches, require good connectivity, which is very important for a branch to have. They managed to have an SLA of almost 100%. In the case of network failures, they had very few issues, and most of the links, since they were on a traditional network, used active-passive. However, with this product, they could aggregate the bandwidth and come up with new use cases. The customers are really happy.

They have a zero downtime failover mechanism, where, when there's a link failure or a link weakness, or bad link conditions, they provide the ability to fail back seamlessly. That's the most important feature I have worked with.

The initial setup is pretty seamless.

The solution is stable.

It’s scalable.

Right now, certain SD-WAN vendors work with very strong enterprise-scale firewall features. For example, Fortinet is what most of my customers prefer to have. However, in terms of Citrix, they had minimal features. Now, they have improved things. That's an area where Citrix has to improve since Citrix is not a security company. They rely on other vendors like Zscaler. Overall, network security and next-generation firewall features are areas that they can improve on.

We have worked with them for around five years.

We haven’t had any real issues with stability. We put it in for countrywide operations, however, and we expected there would be a lot of returns. There are actually very few, and even these returns were out of Citrix's control. For example, we had a few appliances return back due to lightning and the resulting power surges. Besides that, we rarely have failures, so the client is happy.

In my case, my geography is relatively small. I operate in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and the Maldives - these kinds of countries. Here, we don't have many installations over 1,000. That said, Citrix can very easily go beyond 1,000 branches and endpoints. They have large scalable models also. For my use cases, they are scalable enough.

The customers who are using the solution 100% rely on it, at least for the branch connectivity. They are not quite keen to use inter-data-center use cases, such as WAN optimization. However, in terms of my customers, they use it 100% in most cases. We have helped some customers to improve their application performance with this solution. Most customers ask from our side from a traditional SD-WAN whether they can move to a zero-trust network. It was the evolution of Citrix. We are helping and educating our customers, et cetera.

Customer service is really good. We have had a few tech support cases. We had to do some version upgrades where we had some challenges. However, the tech support is really good. I have worked across many products, for example, for Extender Top, XenServer, et cetera. The Citrix team has been extra helpful.

Positive

My customers used the traditional BGP routing base on a normal Cisco-based solution. So this is the evolution of new tech for them. They are moving from traditional interest to SD-WAN.

We recommend products like Meraki and Fortinet. Fortinet is good, especially for some hospitality customers. We find it quite interesting. In terms of Fortinet, the customers are really keen since their CPs are very cost-efficient, so they have a big advantage in TC when compared with Citrix. Especially Fortinet, people like it due to the security advantage, and Fortinet is influencing this market in terms of network security.

Once we do the base configuration or the head setup and then the configuration, then we can send an L2 team to do the deployment with very few instructions. We ask them just to plug in the cables and download their profiles. It's quite seamless. My customers evolved from a traditional BGP environment. For them, this is quite seamless. They are happy, and the operational overhead is also lower for them.

For a single customer, the effort involved in the deployment varies. Maybe a five-man team could very easily manage the network since the failures are lower, and they also have this failover feature where even when the branch is down, they can still help the customer. Five or six people would be sufficient to manage and maintain everything. With Citrix cloud coming in and analytics help, you won’t need a big team. It's quite proactive, and not quite reactive. The number of people required is relatively low to maintain everything.

We do the deployment ourselves.

There are multiple pricing options. They have an MSP model also. However, we deployed the channel or the normal appliance model. Of course, it has been three to four years on the same price point. I'm not quite sure of the price ranges. Roughly, the hidden devices can scale up to $20K for one appliance. However, the branch CPs are USD $1,000 to $2,500.

We get everything under the list price. However, especially if you are thinking of having a branch internet breakout, then sometimes you might have to get another solution like Zscaler or Symantec for the proxy of internet security.

I’m just an end-user.

I used to work for a Citrix partner, so we were the Citrix regular partner. Right now, in my present job, I'm not affiliated with them.

What we used is the on-prem deployment. They have certain companies on the cloud. However, it's pretty much on-prem for this solution.

Potential users should ask Citrix to give firm commitments regarding product life cycles and changes. Usually, Citrix is undergoing a lot of changes internally. Their product directions change, product names change, and many things change. So Users need to check, especially if they are modernizing the network.

I’d rate the solution seven out of ten.

As the top manager and core engineer in my company working to secure job sites, I used a demonstration version of Citrix SD-WAN to enhance the communication between our branches and data centers. Specifically, it has been used to connect single branches with multiple data centers, where communication can flow quickly across them all. So, with Citrix SD-WAN, the primary use case is the provision of wide internet access from the data centers into our branches, as well as letting us manage the IT services through the cloud. 

Previously, we had simply been using direct internet access in each branch, but we realized that our internet usage would be more normalized with Citrix SD-WAN. Our hardware devices are on-premises, of course, but the SD-WAN management is now done on the cloud.

The reason why we went with Citrix SD-WAN came about when we were looking to integrate one of our branches with the rest of the company in a simpler, more centralized manner. We wanted an easy integration solution that would let us deploy connectivity to a branch with only a few clicks, and so we tried Citrix SD-WAN. When deploying Citrix SD-WAN, we found that we could deploy very easily with a simple installation template, and it helped us clear up the configuration to get everything up and running.

The main advantage of Citrix SD-WAN is that it enables fast communication between our branches and data centers. And, with its cloud management features, it also makes the process of adding new branches into our company network much easier.

Another reason why I like this solution is because it ensures the smooth and effective operation of the company's POS software. 

Given that Citrix SD-WAN solved all our problems by providing us with everything we needed to unify communications with our branches and data centers, I cannot suggest anything further in terms of improvements.

I have used Citrix SD-WAN for three months.

It is stable.

It's a scalable solution. Once you've deployed it in the cloud, it's very flexible and can be adapted to your needs.

I think their support system works very well, and we were also working with a local reseller which was a good experience.

We were trying some other vendors at the same time that seemed to fit the job, but we had to help those vendors too much in trying to come up with a solution for us.

The setup was incredibly easy. The hardest part of the job was having to deploy during the day. However, with the configuration template we used, the deployment was a breeze.

Our communication with the vendor support was highly interactive and, in total, it took us only a day or two to deploy.

As a team of five members, we deployed Citrix SD-WAN in-house without the help of a third-party reseller team.

As for maintenance, we promoted one staff member to handle physical intervention and another for configuration.

I believe that Citrix SD-WAN is a good investment, but I do not have the information to be more specific.

I am not aware of the details of the licensing cost in this case because I was only trying it out.

The functionality of Citrix SD-WAN is awesome and I fell in love with it on this deployment because it's so easy to use. It has everything that I need, I know what what works and what doesn't, and it has great flexibility in terms of management.

I would rate Citrix SD-WAN a ten out of ten.

Our company uses Citrix SD-WAN for branch-to-branch connectivity, internet routing, and firewall policies.

Citrix SD-WAN's first good feature is its connectivity between branches. The tool is quite cost-effective because it replaces the need for MPLS, which is a bit expensive. Managing Citrix SD-WAN's platform is easy since you can manage it online. One can manage all the devices in different branches on a central portal online.

Citrix SD-WAN's knowledge base has a few missing things, so you may need to seek help from support. One of the challenges in the solution is that Citrix's support takes time since it involves a bit of a lengthy process. Despite the challenges, I think the solution is good.

The solution's installation phase has certain shortcomings and needs improvement.

I have been using Citrix SD-WAN for two years. I am an end-user of the solution.

It's a stable product. We have encountered a few issues, like glitches and bugs causing some of the devices to fail, while also facing a hardware failure.

Our company faced some difficulties when trying to scale up the solution. I can say it's not easily scalable since it needs a major upgrade somewhere.

Four of my organization's branches use the product.

I rate the technical support a five out of ten. I rate the support less since the response time is too high, and a lot of time gets taken to resolve an issue for a ticket raised by us.

Neutral

Citrix SD-WAN is the first-ever solution we implemented.

Citrix SD-WAN's installation process can be termed as an average one.

Once you have the policies and if you have a new device, the deployment process takes a few minutes to half an hour.

The appliances are deployed on-premises, but the controller is cloud-based. In general, it can be considered a cloud-based solution.

One engineer is required for deployment.

Compared to other SD-WAN products in the market, Citrix SD-WAN offers the best return on investment since its annual subscription cost is quite low compared to other solutions.

Citrix SD-WAN is quite an affordable product.

Citrix SD-WAN doesn't need much maintenance. It only needs some monitoring and updating of the firmware. One person is able to do the maintenance comfortably.

It's a good solution. The only challenge with the tool will be the support offered by Citrix. There is a need for a lot of technical support required.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.