Experiences with Citrix Load Balancing products?

Thu Aug 10 23:14:40 UTC 2006

Complete mistakes, errors, and ommissions might be mine.

Most people who have had experience with the NetScaler products prior to 
Citrix seemed to have mostly liked them and been happy with the service and 
support.  I had fewer people respond from this camp though so that might be 
skewed, the people that did respond seemed much more satisfied than the 
people that responded who'd bought the Citrix product.

Common complaints were Windows and/or Java only WebUIs on both the product 
and Citrix' support site.  No email support to open a case.  Required to 
fill out a Word Doc form for RMAs.  People who've tried bonding had various 
issues with it, but atleast one was able to get it working.

The biggest common complaint was the support since going to Citrix was 
almost universally bad.  I had one person who said they'd had good support 
since the switchover, with others complaining of support chasing the wrong 
issue, taking many days, requiring remote sessions to windows boxen in 
order to use a browser on the other end to diagnose, changing settings 
without consulting the customer.

The boxen themselves seem to perform as advertised and are reliable for 
most people.  The general consensus seems to be their is a lack of 
documentation, a lack of tracking of release issues.  It points to a lack 
of QA/Testing on Citrix' part for new software releases.

They seem to not be really well suited for hosting environments with many 
services, having some limitations in that arena, although the limits do 
seem to be fairly generous (I wasn't able to get hard numbers).

On the whole, noone really raved about the Citrix product.  Most were 
lukewarm at best.

My verdict is that we'll keep an eye on them but not going to bother with 
an eval now.  Our deal breakers are the requirement of windows or java 
webui's to manage the product, or even to get support.  Also the general 
consensus of everyone responding that Citrix' support isn't very great.  A 
few responders did have good support experiences, and reported that during 
the transition period from NetScaler->Citrix things were definitely sketchy.

I'm deliberately not making direct references to any of the people who 
responded to me, this is just a brief summary of the various conversations 
I've had today.

Thanks again to everyone who responded.  I know some of you had much better 
experiences with Citrix than I've portrayed here, and I honestly hope that 
that will become the norm, but on the whole people had a fairly poor view 
of Citrix' support for this product.