Citrix NetScaler VPX on Microsoft Azure Accelerates Your Applications in the Cloud

Cloud computing offers a fundamental change in the way organizations deploy and accesses their business applications.  Cloud computing is about leveraging resources over the network to enable an organization to work more efficiently and with greater agility. Getting the best results from applications in the cloud requires an application delivery controller (ADC) to provide an always-on, always-secure foundation to ensure performance. The ADC solution for the cloud needs to provide the ability to balance workloads and manage user traffic while providing granular visibility into application performance and control for reliable application delivery. To meet these needs Citrix and Microsoft have collaborated to make the Citrix NetScaler ADC available on Microsoft Azure. 

Citrix NetScaler VPX for Microsoft Azure
Citrix NetScaler VPX is a virtual appliance for L4-7 networking services that ensures organizations have access to applications deployed in the cloud that is secure and optimized for high performance. VPX supports widely deployed applications such as Citrix XenApp® and Citrix XenDesktop®, as well as specific workloads including Microsoft Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.  VPX provides a networking foundation that ensures scalability, adjusting to the changing needs of a cloud environment without the physical limitations. A superior user experience on Microsoft applications and workloads is delivered through performance enhancements such as compressing, load balancing, and SSL acceleration. VPX provides a set of capabilities to ensure availability and to keep applications connected and protected. Advanced security capabilities ensure against attacks that can disable your applications or put your data in danger. VPX allows organizations to securely connect to their environments from anywhere from any device. VPX puts you in control of applications with the visibility required to keep your applications performing.


NetScaler routes traffic in and out of the Azure Virtual Network with two or more subnets within each virtual network. Customers can leverage Network Security Groups to control network traffic by providing a filter for each VM within a subnet. Each virtual network has a single NetScaler VPX deployed across it.

Leveraging Converged Infrastructure To Deliver Microsoft Exchange 2010

The Critical Communications Tool
While we hear a lot about new communications technologies for most of us email is the tool that we use everyday. For end users email is still the most efficient way to communicate globally but for the IT department email can be a difficult application to deploy and manage. Guaranteeing performance and availability for an increasingly mobile workforce, while keeping costs in check is a challenge. Organizations are challenged with the time required to manage email delivery systems. Time is spent on installation and configuration of software and the supporting infrastructure. Much of an organization staff can be consumed by routine tasks driving up the cost of ownership. It can be difficult to determine what infrastructure is required to scale up as the number of users increases. As email becomes more feature rich supporting large numbers of power users creates increasing demands on the systems. Organizations want predictable operation and support for their entire solution. They want to be sure that they are maximizing system resource utilization and eliminating server underutilization while delivering a superior user experience.

Making the Move to Exchange 2010
With Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft has made significant changes in the architecture to address the growing need of businesses to increase mailbox quotas, drive down storage and IT costs, provide a high degree of availability, meet regulatory requirements for data retention and compliance, and enhance the productivity. To take advantage of the new HA, DR and archiving functionalities, IT organizations may have to look at a new platform, and re-architect the Exchange environment. Changes in how storage is managed creates the incentive to change the storage infrastructure. The new database availability group (DAG) functionality requires Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, requiring an upgrade to 64-bit server hardware. The Single Instance Storage (SIS) feature that reduced redundancy by storing only a single copy of an email or attachment has been eliminated increasing storage requirements.

Optimizing Windows 7 Desktop Delivery over WAN using Cisco WAAS

As the migration to Windows 7 as the desktop operating system picks up, IT organizations are looking at hosting desktops in the data center using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as the desktop delivery method. We are finding that this is especially popular in the finance, healthcare, and federal verticals where security and compliance makes VDI an attractive choice. Moreover, IT managers in other vertical industries are interested in this technology as a flexible option to serve their employees while assisting with their desktop management goals.

One of the ongoing dilemmas for IT continues to be ensuring a good user experience for any new method used for delivering applications to end users. Many users are in remote branch offices, campus locations, or are mobile; as a result these users are separated from the data center by the Wide Area Network (WAN). Limited bandwidth (per user) on the WAN pipes, high WAN latencies, packet loss, and more often a combination of all three, impacts the user experience significantly. This is where the Cisco WAN optimization solution (Cisco WAAS) can assist IT with delivering a rich Windows 7 user experience to remote users while reducing the need for bandwidth upgrades.

If one looks at the usage profile, users are typically using productivity applications (eg: email, web, document preparation, presentations, etc), and accessing corporate videos for training as well as printing documents. These users are accustomed to getting a rich experience using applications locally on their Windows 7 desktops. The goal of the Cisco WAAS solution is to maintain this rich experience when the desktop moves to the data center, and is delivered using a VDI delivery protocol such as Microsoft RDP over the WAN.