I am in Citrix NetScaler training for most of this week. I have heard good stuff about this product, but I am interested to hear about anyone else’s opinion.
Another interesting thought. Now that I am not responsible for the security of a network, I have no issue posting on my blog what I am going to be doing for the next couple of days. I feel so free!Â
Vet
I’ve always found the Citrix Netscaler tech support team to be very good, much better then the department that deals with Presentation server issues!
Most of the Citrix SEs will openly admit to knowing little or nothing about netscaler.
I was on the BOA trainning and unfortunatley it was quite a poor course consisting of someone who didnt really know anything about netscalers reading words form a powerpoint presentation – any questions were ‘not covered in the course’.
We’re currently deploying our second Netscaler to a second physical location. My initial experience is that the sales engineer is not who you want for technical support. Our SE tells us exactly what he thinks we want to hear and throws caution to the wind to make us happy. One great example of his security inadequacy is when he told one of our less-technical IT folks to ‘simply plug the DMZ switch into the inside LAN switch’ in order to leverage the device in the DMZ for web servers on our internal LAN.
A few days later the switches had discovered the new route and started looping packets into our DMZ from the LAN. Panic and mayhem ensued and to make a long story short, we no longer trust him as far as we can throw him. AND he’s a CISSP.
Another example is recently we were trying to do the mundane task of generating a CSR and then import the resultant, signed cert. After 1.5 hours on a Friday evening we gave up only to solve the problem ourselves on Saturday and as it turns out the advice we were given by the VAR was so far off the mark it was ridiculous. The VAR was supporting us, by recommendation from the SE. As it turns out, the VAR didn’t know jack. He knew less than we did!
But if you can get beyond technical support, the product is pretty sweet. We use it to cluster web servers in both HA and/or load balancing, with multiple, unique sub-domains. We also use them to NAT in bound and outbound traffic to and from the clusters, which adds an additional layer of security between your servers and the wild-wild-’Net.
I am finding that to be very true. Those were almost the first words that came out of the instructors mouth.
Michael
From what I have heard, NetScaler training needs a little revision. See http://www.citrixxperience.com/blog/?p=58.
- Jeff