I’m getting a lot of search words on my blog regarding “Lync and Netscaler setup” “load balancing Lync” “Lync and HA Netscaler” “Lync and Reverse proxy”. Probably because I have alot of content around Netscaler. But anyways to answer the question, can we use Netscaler to do all these things ? Load balancing, high-availability and reverse proxy for Lync 2013?
Sure we can, I even recommend it.
Citrix Netscaler is supported by Microsoft as a Load balancer for Lync http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn788945 as a hardware appliance and as a pure virtual software appliance. Citrix has also made a deployment guide which shows how we can deploy Lync using Netscaler http://www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/documents/products-solutions/microsoft-lync-2013-and-citrix-netscaler-deployment-guide.pdf
You can also read more about it, in this datasheet here –> https://www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/documents/products-solutions/citrix-netscaler-datasheet-microsoft-lync-2013.pdf
So why should you use Netscaler for Lync ? according to Gartner, they are one of the few ADC recognized as a leading product.
Remember to use different TCP profiles for outside traffic and inside traffic since this will drastically improve the network performance. (If you are using TCP for SIP traffic, and for other TCP based connections)