The IT Melting Pot!

Ok, I understand that this is something that I’ve touched upon before as well and received some comments on (NetScaler MPX vs. SDX dilemma). But I’ll still continue the reasoning behind why I think that the NetScaler SDX architecture is great, and that is needs to be offered on all the different platforms/appliance types/sizes!

To kick off the reasoning I recommend that you read this post; #NetScaler #AAA on NS 10.00 Build 70.7 = watch out!. When you’ve read both previous posts I hope that you see where I’m now going with all of this…

Just have a look at this picture where I’m trying to illustrate two design options for how you could build your NetScaler service for a tenant;

And if you then keep in mind about the AAA bug that caused the whole NetScaler engine to crash, what happens in the top scenario if this VPX had been affected? Think about if that NetScaler hosted network connectivity to you public cloud services with workloads, all SSL VPN users connected to the enterprise, all ICA/HDX proxy users into XenApp/XenDesktop, and also provided AAA features to the enterprise web apps used by customers and partners etc.? Wow, that would actually mean that one single 401 basic authentication could have taken down EVERYTHING!

But; if you would have separated your capabilities/features into separate VPX’s then you wouldn’t have had that issue. The “only” thing that would have happened if you ran into an issue that caused the NetScaler to crash then it would only affect that VPX (AAA VPX in the scenario above).

So my personal view is that it’s great that Citrix provides all the features on one appliance/instance. But it also adds quality and test efforts on Citrix to ensure that they perform testing of ALL features and functions before releasing a new build. And that may affect the lead-time to get fixes and new builds released and quality may also be impacted… and that’s what I’m afraid of is happening. So a little word of advice; separate workloads/features when you can and when you don’t want this big of a risk, and prey that Citrix soon delivers the SDX architecture on all appliances! And they would of course perhaps not just sell the larger boxes like they force us into today even if the bandwidth capabilities of that box isn’t required. But they would instead sell more VPX’ on top of the HW, that’s at least what I think.

Comments?

Cheers!

//Richard