NetScaler Times newsletter for Week 13 - 2024
Andrew Scott
NetScaler Pre-Sales Specialist - Trying to make the complex stuff accessible to all. Talks about #NetScaler #Application Security #Loadbalancing #Cloud
Hello Everyone
It’s Andrew again over at Cloud Software Group. One thing I've noticed in my role is the steady stream of questions about NetScaler. This update aims to provide you with valuable pointers to keep you up-to-date and ahead of the curve! ??
I would greatly appreciate your continued engagement and feedback, my contact details are at the bottom of this newletter.
Agenda for this week:
1. Build status and updates
The details for the various builds have been summarized below, as this helps plan for new releases in your environment. Starting from 13.1 there will be the following:
Typically, the guidance for NetScaler & NetScaler Console(ADM) build releases is that the Management platform needs to be the same or newer than the NetScaler(s) that it manages. I typically, go with the latest for NetScaler Console.
The NetScaler has multiple form factors to support different environments. NetScaler is built on a single operating system with a software-based architecture, so the behaviour will be the same no matter which is used — hardware, virtual machine, bare metal, or container.
Current Build Versions:
2. Topical from last week?
The setup
Customer X has a two-DC set up in Europe, they have L2 VLANs between those DCs. They currently run NetScaler pairs in ‘regular’ HA between those two DCs
The Problem
A customer had asked about different high-availability options when the DCs do not have stretched L2 VLANs between them. The client did have OTV(Overlay Transport Virtualization) running between DCs today, but the new layout was to move away from this. NetScaler can be deployed with the nodes on different L3 VLANs, normally the NSIPs need to be on the same VLAN (L2 adjacency). Hence the use of OTV as stated above.
The solution
We talked over the different options it became obvious that the best option would be to have HA pairs in each DC and wrap the whole deployment with some GSLB.
Why do it that way?
It has super resilience, you can have multiple failures before switching over DCs. It also builds in some options for taking out a site to make a change, should you need to. The most important option for this client was that HA nodes maintain a session state, such that sessions are known within a DC. HA nodes maintain session tables.
The cost?
The customer was looking at the potential bill for this, as it would need some extra nodes( four nodes against the two that they currently run). However, when we looked at the sizing they have, the vCPU cores that they have are quite lightly loaded (four vCPU’s and it’s doing 4.8% load). Dropping these down to 2 vCPU and adding in extra nodes, would still offer the support for the load that they have while giving them a better resilience between sites. There are some recent charts with session details with recent firmware to make this easy.
The takeaway?
The client had pooled capacity, and taking another look at how it was deployed gave them the option to review where they placed their capacity and meet their changing needs. Platform & Universal HMC make this even easier, as the limits on nodes get lifted, offering new ways to solve problems like this while still having bags of capacity to take on additional load.
3. Support and Security bulletins
These are the latest articles on the support portal knowledgebase, sorted by modified date. Here are the 6 most articles (IMO). The site is located here.
Security updates:
领英推荐
Support Docs:
4. Events and Labs
Events
There are five events for March
06 March
Observability is more than just monitoring the state of applications. Observability is important for IT operations and other stakeholders like SRE, DevOps, Platform and Network Admins to collect and analyze MELT (metrics, events, logs, traces) - for troubleshooting application health issues and surfacing the application security violations. In this demo you will learn:
Watch on-demand here
13 March
Do you require secure DNS but are constrained by outdated servers?? Now you can proxy your DNS queries over TLS. This technique lets you encrypt your DNS requests with TLS, even if your servers only understand plain text. Think of it as a translator, converting modern, encrypted queries into a format your outdated systems can handle. This means enhanced privacy and security without ditching your legacy infrastructure. Sounds like a win-win? Dive deeper and discover how this innovative approach can protect your data while keeping your DNS functioning smoothly.?
In this live demo, our NetScaler experts will showcase
Watch/register here
21 March
In this webinar, we’ll discuss application delivery challenges faced by OpenShift platform admins and developers:
Watch/register here
28 March - EMEA/APJ & Americas
In this webinar, our NetScaler experts will cover: 1. Maximising Infrastructure Automation: Terraform Provider for SVM (SDX) enhancements. 2. Support Assist: Practical Implication of NetScaler’s nFactor authentication
Watch/register EMEA/APJ here
Watch/register Americas here
Labs
Go here for the hands-on labs. Link
5. Feedback for this newsletter
Naturally, if something you feel should be added/removed or called out, drop me a note; [email protected]. Any mistakes are all mine.
I would be happy to get feedback on what you could do with seeing more of or what you find hard to set up. You can get all the previous newsletters plus other articles here:
Have a great week!