Citrix SD-WAN Reviews

Our primary use case is for stability and redundancy on connectivity from the branch offices to the company head office data centre. We have a head office and six remote branches. Most of the applications we deliver to the branches are through terminal services. This includes the EPR system, Microsoft Dynamics-AX. Everything is hosted on-prem. When a line between the branch office and the head office was down the branch could not operate. For most sales orders we have a 4 business hour turnaround time from order to delivery. So when a line is down we were losing sales. SD-WAN has prevented this almost completely. 

Downtime for branch offices is now almost zero. We have 100% real-time visibility into all of our lines. MPLS links have been replaced with lower-cost links, saving a larger percentage of line costs. Overall, I see SD-WAN as a must. And the Citrix SD-WAN product has delivered on expectations and exceeded them. (With later firmware updates we now have good firewall capabilities in the product too.). In one specific notable case that was an outage at an upstream provider that would have taken our Cape Town office offline. And this was on the first of the month when we process bulk orders. The branch did not even know the line was down thanks to SD-WAN. 

Lines run Active-Active. So we get better bandwidth usage i.e.we don't have backup lines sitting idle. We see the state of all lines all the time i.e. we don't have backup lines that are broken, that we only discover when a primary line fails. (This has happened even when we had an MPLS network). Downtimes on lines result in a loss of business. This is inevitable given that we run all applications through terminal applications from the head office data centers.  In the 4 years running SD-WAN, we have only had 1 branch offline due to line failures where the backup line could not cope with the additional load. 

The firewall reporting could be easier to use and filter. (It works well enough, but if I need to give an area for improvement, I think this would be it.). The built-in reporting on the product in this regard is not great. You can get a much more detailed reporting analysis using the SD-WAN center that is configurable with the product. If the additional reporting capabilities were bundled into the Master Controller Node, it would make the solution more appealing, and add better value from day one.

I have been using Citrix SD-WAN for four years. 

We have used an external consultant, (Troye) to complete the set-up. Between Troye and Citrix South Africa we were in excellent hands from beginning to end. The requirements were drafted between KOLOK, Troye the partner and Citrix South Africa.  We had very qualified consultants on site for the cut-over.  It was a smooth migration.  There were a few complex issues that came from how the ISP had configured routing in the MPLS.  These issues were resolved by Citrix.  We have subsequently removed all MPLS links. 

Easy under 18 months.

If I was going to look at this project again now, I would investigate the option of using virtual appliances rather then physical appliances. I don't know enough about this option, but I think it would have some cost and give better DR options.  

We looked at the Cisco product at the time. (Briefly). But we found the Citrix product to be better because it uses a packet by packet switching, where as the Cisco apparently switched session by session to the best line. This was some time back, and I have not looked at the Cisco product since.

I used to stress about line failures. MPLS was not working for me. MPLS gave me no visibility into the line redundancy. And MPLS is very expensive. SD-WAN was an easy choice for me.  Citrix has delivered. 

We are a solution provider and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

One of the use cases was as an optimizer in a low-bandwidth area where I wanted to replace the MPLS connection.

The most valuable feature is security, as it gives me the port bindings that cannot be accomplished using other solutions.

This solution gives me IPv6 layering over IPv4, which is helpful for some environments.

The documentation is very good.

I would like to either see the price reduced or have it packaged with other products to give better value for the money. For example, other solutions have multiple services embedded in their appliance, which gives better value.

I have worked with NetScaler SD-WAN in several projects over the past three years.

This is a stable and mature product. We have few admin support cases and the maintenance is very limited.

This solution scales out well. We generally work with large business and enterprise-level organizations.

The technical support from Citrix is very good. If I am stuck while performing a setup, I can get immediate support while I am on the call.

I have also work with similar solutions from Riverbed. I found that the documentation and support from Citrix were better.

Setting up is a little bit complex. It is definitely not done with the click of a button.

For us, it normally takes about a week to understand the requirements and deploy it.

As NetScaler is now, I find it quite pricey.

My advice to anybody who is considering this product is to first understand the business and the requirements. No solution should be purchased in haste. I have seen businesses with proper tools but they don't know what to do with them.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for network latency authentication.

I don't have the level of detail to discuss the most valuable features of the solution. It doesn't come into my area of focus.

The scalability and stability are quite good in general.

I don't have too many details about what is lacking in the solution as I don't work with the solution in depth.

The initial setup could be a bit easier.

When it comes to networking from NetScaler, we have a continuous challenge in terms of getting and using other software.

We've been using the solution for over two years now.

The stability of the solution is good.

The scalability of the solution is fine. It scales much better when companies choose to use the cloud.

We normally contact technical support. We maintain different customer's clouds so we're constantly working with specific technical solutions and support. They are very good. We have a good relationship with them and have had good interactions overall.

We didn't previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is not that easy. We needed assistance with the initial installation.

We had assistance from consultants who helped us with the implementation of the solution. We've had a long working relationship with them and are quite satisfied with the level of service they've provided to us.

I don't have enough information on the pricing or what our company pays in order to discuss licensing in any great detail.

We're using an older version of the solution, not the newest version.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

We don't use the solution ourselves, rather, we provide services to our clients.

We're testing it for a client right now. Whether the client will ultimately go with the solution is up to them.

Our company always promotes NetScaler, and for that reason, I'd give it a ten out of ten.

For the load balancing of the application is for load balancing and as a VPN gateway. 

We have a requirement where only the users who have a company laptop are connected to the system only using a VPN. We hand out the authority based on whether or not users have the company laptop or they can be converted by a company using the EPA, we can check if the laptop is in the domain or not. 

The VPN and the load balancing are the most valuable features. 

The reports need to be improved. We need to have them customized but they don't have that right now. I would like for them to have better system predictions. My system may be working fine right now but after making some changes, that can change and I would like to know about it. 

I would like to see better reports. 

It's been three years we have deployed this product and I have not had any downtime or any issues with the product. The product is stable.

We can upgrade easily using the license. 

There are 20,000 users that are connecting to my boxes because my websites, and other applications are posted on the NetScaler box only. We only require two people for maintenance. One is the administrator of the network and the other person is monitoring it. One is the administrator and the other is the engineer. 

Support-wise, they're good. 

We were using another solution but it had limitations and a lot of downtimes. That's when we changed the product.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Licensing is good. I don't have any issues with the rationing of it. 

Pricing-wise, it is a little bit high compared to the other products which are the market right now. Because of the stability and availability of the product, I am fine with the price, but it's a little bit on the high side compared to the other products.

We also looked at Cisco Load Balancer and Radware. We did the PoC and we found the scale was good, so that's why we bought NetScaler.

My advice is that if you want to implement NetScaler make sure to get Citrix support for help.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. I took off two points because of the bad deployment.