The blog..

So it seems Citrix is launching a regular attack on the Access Gateway Enterprise product.

It seems that the new Citrix Netscaler Standard edition will include alot of cool features for the customers who were thinking netscaler but didnt know if they could afford it

Some of the new features:

• Global Server Load Balancing(GSLB)
• Access Gateway Enterprise(yes, now included in standard, nice way to save a few thousand dollars )
• Intelligent load balancing of XenApp WI and XML-Brokers

Citrix Netscaler standard has always been the entry level product an in my oppinion it used to be good for nothing more than a bit of ssl offloading, load balancing of webservices, and a bit of ssl vpn. And in my book it was a bit overpriced for these ‘simple’ tasks.

However with the new features i think Citrix Netscaler standard edition is actually opening up for even danish-sized companies.

GSLB

Global Server Load Balancing is the functionality to allow load balancing between different sites, this could be used for throttling connections between different datacenters or simply to have a dynamic failover to a disaster site in case of a disaster.

Access Gateway Enterprise

This functionality allows the netscaler to take on some of the features we know from the Access Gateway standard and advanced editions. This includes the feature to allow Secure Gateway connections to your XenApp farm as we used to do with the Secure Gateway product on Windows Server and which we now do even better with Access Gateway.

Besides those features we also have the chance to do some endpoint scanning to do policy based access. To check for Antivirus and other stuff.

Intelligent Load balanding of XenApp WI and XML

As the icing on the cake for us old XenApp, Presentation Server people we finally get intelligent load balancing of WI and XML services. This allows us not only to load balance these by round robin, least connections etc. but it also gives us the opportunity to be proactive. This will allow us not only to load balance several XML brokers, or WI’s but also to have advanced warning.

This means that if one of our XML brokers for some reason starts talking gibberish, it will be taken out of the loop and users will be redirected to other brokers. On top of this the administrator can be alerted and take action so that we dont end up with all our XML brokers down before people start complaining.

All in all, i think Netscaler Standard is actually beginning to look good, even if it is a bit more expensive than the Access Gateway Standard edition

/Rene Vester