Update: Coding tut now available! Today we’re going to walk you through how to create your own “juicy tabbed slider”. This is a great way to add some extra depth and dimensionality to your own designs – and it’s the perfec…
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Or any Application for that matter.Chris Fleck gave fair warning. I’m here to tell you that it works and its here, now. The computing model just got turned on it’s ear.
Why would you want this? Because it increases your mobility without having to reboot your laptop everytime you want to use it, it saves time and money, and it delivers any Windows platform or application to your iPhone, iPod or iPad.
What was previously just a future scenario is now a reality.
Citrix runs Windows and Windows Applications from a central server, called XenDesktop, and pipes it out to your mobile device through the NetScaler AGEE. This is perfect for the iPad which has a screen size of 1024×768. Now the touch, squeeze and pinch is available for all of your Enterprise applications, making them usable on an iPad.
The small form factor of the iPhone was a little hindering for Enterprise applications. Now, with the iPad and Citrix Receiver, Enterprise Apps are usable. Although, while putting together this POC the Product Manager sent me an eMail from Microsoft Office 2010 running on a Windows 7 Desktop … from his iPhone. This confirms that form factors and the computing model is about to be rocked.
The magic is in the way that Citrix hosts the Windows desktops and delivers them to the mobile device. The advantage is all of the computing power of multi-core processors and large memory can still be utilized by Windows, while all of your touching and pinching power is localized at your mobile device.
All of the communication is done over secure tunnels, so all of the information is secure.
For this Proof of Concept, We started with XenServer, installed XenApp and XenDesktop, built a NetScaler to Front-end and secure the infrastructure, and fired up our iPhones and iPads. Its fast, easy and cool. We used the Citrix Web Interface for authentication to keep it simple. You can also use LDAP or any other type of authentication method.
You can have this setup, by following the guides we wrote up as a result of this testing.
Download the Deployment Guide – ICA Proxy for iPhone, using LDAP authentication.
Citrix Receiver is available for Free on the App Store
Get an iPhone, iPod or iPad from Apple.
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Cloud Networking is secure and robust You can create a complete end-to-end network from one cloud network, running on XenServer, through a VPN to another network in a different cloud. All servers and hosts communicate securely over SSL VPN. Amazon Machine Images are secured by the Amazon infrastructure using security groups.
The proof of concept speaks for itself. Between the Softlayer cloud and the Amazon EC2 cloud is running a site-to-site SSL VPN using Vyatta. All of the images in this architecture are running on XenServer. This proof of concept gives rise to many networking architectures for cloud computing.
The reason for using Vyatta site-to-site SSL VPN between the Softlayer and Amazon EC2 clouds is there needs to be a secure network between the two for the transfer of data. The Vyatta AMI (Amazon Machine Image) can also function as a complete router, firewall and DNS cache. The Vyatta SSL VPN router provides security with scalability. Suppose I wanted to separate the Vyatta SSL VPN from a Vyatta OSPF router, I would just launch another instance of the Vyatta AMI.
As you can see from the network diagram and video, complete routing from the Softlayer cloud to the Amazon cloud network is seamless, without having to buy any proprietary hardware. In fact, it is very low cost compared to traditional network solutions. Virtualized networking is here, it is fast, secure and cheap.
A CloudBurst happens when Citrix Workflow Studio determines that one of the devices in the Softlayer Cloud has reached a high watermark. WFS then instructs the NetScaler VPX to start sending traffic to the Cloud – CloudBurst.
To get your own cloud, go here
Vyatta SSL VPN (V1) – Datacenter Configuration
Vyatta SSL VPN (V2) – Cloud Configuration
XenApp VPN Client – Cloud Configuration
Vyatta for XenServer – go here
Amazon EC2 – go here
XenServer is Free! – go here
XenApp – go here
Workflow Studio – go here
XenApp VPN Client – go here
Dell Server – go here
IP Addresses – go here
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Today, Citrix announced a virtual appliance version of their NetScaler Application Delivery Controller – the NetScaler VPX, the first of its kind. All of the functions that traditionally were performed in the datacenter can now be performed in the domain of virtual machines. Load balancing, application acceleration, security and offload functionality are now available as a XenServer virtual appliance.
No other vendor offers this type of software as a Virtual Appliance. By making advanced web application delivery functionality available as a virtual appliance, NetScaler VPX drives convergence of virtualization and networking. In the continued movement toward simple and affordable convergence, NetScaler VPX makes sophisticated application delivery functionality available to any size organization. This breaks down deployment barriers for all types of organizations.
What used to run on a proprietary piece of hardware now runs on any hardware that supports virtualization. Because there is no physical appliance to ship, install or move VPX can be installed at a moment’s notice, on any server running XenServer.
SharePoint TemplateAppExpert Templates are nothing new for NetScaler. However, with a new release of NetScaler comes an updated, new and improved NetScaler AppExpert Template for use with Microsoft SharePoint applications.
AppExpert Templates are a simple approach to configuration management for complex enterprise applications. In one simple view, you can view what is most important to you in terms of application delivery. No more confusing and complex rules to define, reducing the time to deploy, easing management and improving the bottom line.
Improvements to the template include additional optimizations for Image Management, Scripts, SOAP and FrontPage. Caching and Compression policies have been optimized, along with the addition of a section for rewrite. There is a redirect policy for converting HTTP to HTTPS on the fly, to enable secure traffic to/from the Microsoft SharePoint applications.
All of these improvements can be found in the new Microsoft SharePoint template, and a description of the template can be found in the updated SharePoint Deployment Guide.
Download the updated Microsoft SharePoint AppExpert Template here (NS v9.0 b66 required).
Download the updated Microsoft SharePoint Deployment Guide here.
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Load Balancing Auto-Configuration for SAP using Workflow Studio and NetScalerAt the tail end of our certification process at SAP, Citrix engaged in a unique opportunity to make use of the SAP APIs, using Workflow Studio to auto-configure the Citrix NetScaler for Load Balancing. The way it works is, Workflow Studio polls the SAP API, reads the response, and then based on the results in the response, configures the NetScaler Load Balancing groups that map directly to the SAP servers running in the server farm.
SAP has a community group dedicated to the development of their APIs, please reference the latest blog post Catching Up with Deployment and Operations Automation, describes the SAP APIs.
The SAP Community Definition Group (CDG) – titled “PCDG 97 NetWeaver Infrastructure APIs for Network Solutions” – is focused on automation of network-application integrated configuration and operation. As the group title implies, the SAP NetWeaver technology platform includes APIs, which are used by the NetScaler ADCs (load balancers) to auto-configure themselves as proxies for multi-instance SAP application systems. Using Citrix Workflow Studio, the SAP APIs are polled on a regular basis so that the NetScaler ADCs can react to SAP application instance changes during production runtime.
If another application instance is brought up, let’s say for providing more computing capacity for an increasing end-user load, or if an instance is brought down temporarily for maintenance, Workflow Studio communicates with the NetScaler ADC to adjust load balancing automatically without any manual administrator intervention. There is no more wait, or lengthy change management required to provision applications.
Workflow Studio sends a URL request to the SAP Message Server, and receives a response. Workflow Studio parse’s the response, looking for specific SAP generated patterns. WFS then uses this information to configure a Load Balancing Virtual Server inside of the Citrix NetScaler.
Workflow Studio repeatedly queries the SAP API. WFS studio can determine hostnames, ip addresses, port numbers, and whether an SAP server is coming online or going down. When a SAP server comes online/goes down – WFS detects this change, and then takes action on the Citrix NetScaler, to add/remove the SAP service from the Load Balancing group – automatically.
Workflow Studio queries the SAP API, determines a SAP server is going down, and based on the response, waits until all existing sessions have been retired, before removing the server from the Load Balancing group . During the shutdown period, no new sessions are added to that SAP server, providing a graceful shutdown of the SAP service. This way, there are no TCP resets sent to existing sessions. New logins are routed to a different server.
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The Citrix NetScaler can be placed in front of a webserver farm that is running Apache. The same re-write rules that run on Apache, can be implemented on the Citrix NetScaler. On some Apache web servers there is more than one URL for a resource. Usually there are canonical URLs (which should be used and distributed as a best practive) and those which are just shortcuts, internal ones, etc. Independent of which URL was supplied with the request, the user should only see the canonical one URL in the response.
Example : converting URL /~user to /u/user.
Apache rewrite:
RewriteRule ^/~([^/]+)/?(.*) /u/$1/$2[R]
AppExpert rewrite:
Add responder action act1 redirect '"/u/"+HTTP.REQ.URL.AFTER_STR("/~")' -bypassSafetyCheck yes Add responder policy pol1 'HTTP.REQ.URL.STARTSWITH("/~") && HTTP.REQ.URL.LENGTH.GT(2)' act1 Bind responder global pol1 100
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The Citrix NetScaler can be placed in front of a webserver farm that is running Apache. The same re-write rules that run on Apache, can be implemented on the Citrix NetScaler.
The goal of the following rule is to force the use of a particular hostname, in preference to other hostnames which may be used to reach the same site. For example, if you wish to force the use of www.example.com instead of example.com, you might use a variant of the following rules.
Example : changing example.com to www.example.com
Apache rewrite:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^80$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.example.com:%{SERVER_PORT}/$1 [L,R]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.example.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R]
AppExpert rewrite:
add responder action act1 redirect '"http://www.example.com:"+CLIENT.TCP.DSTPORT+HTTP.REQ.URL' -bypassSafetyCheck yes add responder policy pol1 '!HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.CONTAINS("www.example.com")&&!HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.EQ("")&&!HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.PORT.EQ(80)&&HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.CONTAINS("example.com")' act1 bind responder global pol1 100 END
add responder action act1 redirect '"http://www.example.com"+HTTP.REQ.URL' -bypassSafetyCheck yes add responder policy pol1 '!HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.CONTAINS("www.example.com")&&!HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.EQ("")&&HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.PORT.EQ(80)&&HTTP.REQ.HOSTNAME.CONTAINS("example.com")' act1 bind responder global pol1 100 END
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