A few of us at iVision just completed a two day NetScaler bootcamp led by Richard Nash at my old office in Alpharetta. With access to a hands-on learning lab, we were able to gain a solid understanding of Netscaler fundamentals.

Day one started with a lecture that covered core topics, including the following key features:

• TCP Connection Multiplexing
• Load Balancing
• SQL Load Balancing (DataStream)
• Compression
• Clustering
• High Availability
• SSL Acceleration
• Attack Defense
• SSL VPN
• Application Firewall
• Global Server Load Balancing
• Caching

We then worked through several scenarios in the learning lab. Being new to NetScaler, I was impressed with how well the Java UI performed, and was quite pleased with it’s functionality and ease of use. The main menu was a bit scary looking at first, but once I navigated through the categories a few times, I was able to quickly find the settings I needed to configure.

The day one lab gave us a good understanding of the steps needed to setup a NetScaler VPX HA pair for load balancing, content switching, and SSL Offload. Generating the SSL cert was a hassle as it always is,  but fortunately the lab was already equipped with a Certificate server.

On day two of the bootcamp, we spent time working with HTTP header modification, port redirection, and URL transformation. We also covered DataStream SQL load balancing and rate limiting, which was very impressive functionality to configure and see in action. Database responders, token-based load balancing, and integrated SQL caching really rounded out the lab.

Unfortunately we didn’t get to cover Access Gateway, but I took some time to review Bill Hackley’s step by step instructions on the Citrix Blogs, which I was able to fairly easily implement in my lab environment. I was pretty satisfied with this training, and believe our team is much better equipped to lead many successful implementations with the foundation that this two day crash course provided!

-Kenny