Netscaler 10.5 review

Now since the release of 10.5 I have been able to test alot of the new features in the latest release. Citrix has also released new versions of Insight and Endpoint clients for Windows & Mac to match the new release.

The upgrades have so far for my part have been non-problematic (in case of a custom GUI you may need to recreate it) from 9.3 and even 10.1 builds. For those that are in a migration plan please refer to the migration document from Citrix http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/ns-faq-map-10-5/ns-faq-migration.html

I have also seen a performance increase in some scenarioes.

There has also been an update on the clustering features, which didn’t caught my eye at first. http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/ns-system-10-map/ns-cluster-feat-supp-ref.html Which allows us to have a Netscaler Gateway vServer running on a local Netscaler node.

Now the new build is 99% pure HTML which is great! there are still some features which still requires JRE, but this is going to be fixed in a future release.

The following features or nodes still require JRE:

• System
  • Upgrade Wizard
  • Diagnostics
  • User Administration
    • Command Policies
    • Command Policy RegEx Editor
• Visualizers
  • Network > Network Visualizer
  • Network > TCP/IP connections
  • Traffic Management > Load Balancing > Visualizer
  • Traffic Management > Content Switching > Visualizer
  • Traffic Management > GSLB > Visualizer
• Security
  • Application Firewall
    • Application Firewall wizard
    • Add/ Edit/ Import profiles
    • Signatures
      • Add
      • Update Version
      • Auto Update Settings

Citrix has also made easier integrations for their own products such as XenDesktop/XenMobile/Sharefile and so on, which makes it easier for consultants to deploy Netscaler solution to provide availability for other products.

Now all of the new features are listed here –> http://support.citrix.com/proddocs/topic/ns-rn-main-release-10-5-map/netscaler-10-5-rn.html

One thing which I find is the most important featue in the latest build (besides the new GUI) is the front-end optimization feature which allows the Netscaler to reduce load and render times on web pages which are rendered on a client browser, after some intials tests with this feature I was able to save 60% of the load time. Since in most cases a web site is not optimized for speed, and therefore Netscaler might be an important piece there.

But to sum it up so far, I’m really impressed with the latest release and how Citrix has made Netscaler even more powerful with more then 100 more features, and makes it a more key component in most datacenters. Looking forward to the later releases to see what Citrix has up their sleeve!