Category Archives: Access Gateway

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).

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.

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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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 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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