Category Archives: Citrix

Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway VPX user scalability numbers explained

  By Barry Schiffer | April 19, 2013 - 10:31 | , ,
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The Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway VPX  and MPX are great platforms for secure remote access to your company network.

When working with Access Gateway there are two methods of setting up your connection.

  1. An integrated connection to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, which we call ICA proxy.
  2. A full SSL VPN connection for access to company servers, which we call SSL-VPN. Both Access methods can be used combined or separate on a Access Gateway node. Both have their own use cases and based on the customer needs you will use either one of them.

Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway is available as a virtual platform (VPX) and as a hardware platform (MPX).

Citrix_Netscaler_MPX_7500_Enterprise_Edition AGVPX

Figure 1. NetScaler Access Gateway MPX

 Figure 2. NetScaler Access Gateway VPX

 

A very important question to ask when choosing between a VPX and MPX model is the amount of users you need to facilitate on the Access Gateway solution. The amount of users is divided between the amount of ICA Proxy users and the amount of SSL-VPN users. A single SSL-VPN user load consumes a lot more resources then a single ICA Proxy user and the resource load of a single SSL-VPN session is impossible to predict because it changes all the time.

So what does Citrix have to say about this?

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How to maximize your virtual Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway performance

  By Barry Schiffer | April 19, 2013 - 10:20 | , ,
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How to maximize your virtual Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway performance.

When you are reading this article you have probably been reading another article which is called NetScaler Access Gateway VPX user scalability numbers explained If you haven’t read this article I advice you to do so before continuing.

In the article mentioned above I focused on explaining why there are so many different “facts” about the amount of users you can facilitate on a virtual Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway. In this follow up article I will try to go into a bit more technical detail about CPU resource consumption and most importantly how you can make sure to get every single possible user sessions out of the virtual appliance.

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Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway What’s the real amount of ICA proxy users you can handle?

  By Barry Schiffer | April 10, 2013 - 11:42 | , ,
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During the years Citrix is working on moving customers from the Citrix Secure Gateway to NetScaler Access Gateway platform. Last year Citrix announced that they will move to one Access Gateway platform based on the Citrix NetScaler. Up to now they had several code bases for similar functionality.

NetScaler Access Gateway

NetScaler Access Gateway retro

Let me start by mentioning that I think it’s a great step to get customers of the Secure Gateway platform. NetScaler Access Gateway is more secure and offers more functionality. The latest step to move to one base platform for Access Gateway is understandable because it saves a lot of time in development and support for Citrix. It also makes a consultants life easier because we had a hard time explaining the differences.

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Thin Client easy? Try to find one that does the trick!

  By Barry Schiffer | January 10, 2013 - 16:18 | , , ,
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During one of my latest projects I was helping my customer with choosing a new Thin Client vendor and model. Only those of you who have been asked such a question and did proper research know that this may sound easy but in reality is a pain in the butt!

 

thin client 1

It sounds so easy, especially when you’re connecting to a Citrix backend because of the all new fantastic HDX System-On-A-Chip (SOC) models being released.

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CPU scheduling and memory optimization solutions compared Part 2 of 2 Memory

  By Barry Schiffer | January 7, 2013 - 14:06 | , , ,
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For a while now customers and colleagues are asking me which tool to use when it comes to CPU scheduling and Memory optimizations. We use several management products and end up with more than one product utilizing these tasks. Choice is good but do we just enable them all and if not what’s the best way to configure this?

When you look a little bit deeper then plain and simple marketing you’ll notice that the way the different products handle memory optimization totally different and combining some of them will degrade system performance or might not work.

To start off I will first try to explain how each product works and will then summarize and see if we can work through them and work to a proper advice. 

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CPU scheduling and memory optimizations solutions compared Part 1 of 2 CPU

  By Barry Schiffer | November 22, 2012 - 17:08 | , , , , , ,
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For a while now customers and colleagues are asking me which tool to use when it comes to CPU scheduling and memory optimizations. We use several management products and end up with more than one product utilizing these tasks. Choice is good but do we just enable them all and if not what’s the best way to configure this?

When you look a little bit deeper then plain and simple marketing you’ll notice that the way the different products handle CPU scheduling is totally different and combining some of them will degrade system performance or simply don’t work for example Citrix CPU management does not start when Microsoft DFSS is enabled.

Before we start I’d like to thank Andrew Morgan for allowing me to re-use some information from his ThreadLocker topic.

To start off I will first try to explain how each product works and will then summarize and see if we can work through them and work to a proper advice.

Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Dynamic Fair Share Scheduling (DFSS)

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