As the enterprise begins its shift to the cloud and architects begin mapping and sizing infrastructure to support their application requirements, they’re presented with the limitless of capacity of the cloud. Since the cloud is highly elastic and can easily scale resources out, is it really necessary to provision a single NetScaler VPX instance in the cloud that can support high performance?
Since the cloud is highly elastic and can easily scale resources out, is it really necessary to provision a single NetScaler VPX instance in the cloud that can support high performance?
Despite the current trend shifting towards micro-service delivery across distributed application architectures, traditional application environments are also moving to the cloud and require higher bandwidth support. One of our larger service provider customers made a compelling business case for this as they began planning for moving their Citrix VDI infrastructure into AWS. They are a well-known online travel booking site and support several agents across the globe who require access to this environment.
Concurrency was the key factor in sizing a NetScaler instance that not only served as the gateway to their Storefront environment, but also facilitated load distribution and traffic management across their back end VDA servers.
Moving these resources to the cloud afforded them expansive coverage that AWS was very well equipped to provide. With the constraints of a 1 Gbps NetScaler VPX instance, they were forced to architect a broader distributed environment leveraging global server load balancing across multiple availability zones to provide expansive user access.
In this particular scenario, moving to a higher capacity instance that can support up to 5 Gbps (VPX 5000), which is now supported in AWS using SR-IOV network interface, would reduce the VM foot print and simplify device management across multiple zones. Fewer nodes, fewer moving parts and lower operational costs.
Amazon EC2 provides enhanced networking capabilities to multiple instance types with the Intel 82599 VF interface. VPX can be configured to use SR-IOV network interfaces using AWS CLI
$ aws ec2 modify-instance-attribute –instance-id <instance_id> –sriov-net-support simple
NetScaler VPX is now supported in AWS at capacities up to 5 Gbps with NetScaler the 11.1-52.106 release and AWS instance C4.8xLarge. Contact your local sales team for details on licensing a new 5 Gbps VPX instance in AWS.NetScaler VPX is also supported in Azure with a 3 Gbps instance.
