What Are Some Good Alternatives to Citrix NetScaler Load Balancers?
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CuriousMaverick92
Our organization is looking to switch from Citrix NetScaler load balancers to something more affordable because the renewal costs have been climbing. Has anyone made the leap away from NetScaler? If so, what did you choose as a replacement and how's it been working out? We're mainly using them for load balancing and reverse proxy for our applications, Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB), and SSL/TLS termination/offload. Any recommendations, experiences, or things to watch out for would be really helpful!
Answers
From what I gather, AVD is a good solution—expensive, but still a solid choice overall.
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If you're using Office 365 and Entra, check out the Entra app proxy. It can publish your internal apps as enterprise ones and comes with conditional access and MFA in the P1 plan. If you need more than just basic web apps, Entra private access can cover every port for a decent price.
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I love how some people here are tossing out replacements like AVD instead of just load balancers, haha. But seriously, Cloudflare's tunneling tech seems promising.
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I've been curious about F5's options in this space. I haven't tried it, but I've heard they're good. There's also Relianoid (formerly Zevenet) which I used before—pretty basic but got the job done.
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Just a heads up, avoid Riverbed. They have a terrible reputation.
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We've been using the Kemp Loadmaster and it's been rock solid for us. Our setup is straightforward, so we haven't faced any outages linked to it. I can't really comment on its pricing compared to NetScaler, though.
KempFanatic99: Totally agree! We have a Kemp Loadmaster for load balancing and SSL/TLS offloading, while still using a Netscaler for ICA Proxy. It's way cheaper than the Netscaler.
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Kemp load balancers have worked well for me. Another option is Cloudflare, which can even do this for free.
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Honestly, like VMware, NetScaler pricing has just skyrocketed. These days, most folks have moved to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for app publishing. It cuts down on managing all the complex configurations and just leaves you with a VPN to Azure and some Virtual Desktops—much cheaper.
ITSupportHero: Exactly! You shift from maintenance to actually providing IT services.
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F5Techie: F5 is solid! Their products are great and can be managed with Infrastructure as Code. Just keep in mind that they announced a breach recently, which might affect their reliability.