Application Delivery Management

Scenarios for Flexed or Pooled license expiry and connectivity issues behavior

September 12, 2025

Contributed by:

Important:

File-based licensing system (also referred to as manually managed entitlements), traditionally used for activating various on-premises components, will be End of Life (EOL) on April 15, 2026. License Activation Service (LAS) is the next generation technology for product activations across the suite of Citrix products. LAS will be the only way to activate and license NetScaler instances after April 15, 2026, supporting NetScaler Flexed licenses (CPL/UHMC), legacy NetScaler Pooled licenses, and NetScaler Fixed term Bandwidth licenses. To remain supported, your NetScaler and NetScaler Console deployments must be on a LAS compatible version.

The minimum required NetScaler versions that are LAS compatible are:

NetScaler ADCs: 14.1-51.x, 13.1-60.x, 13.1-37.x (FIPS)

NetScaler SVM: 14.1-51.x, 13.1-60.x

NetScaler Console Service: Supported from early September.

All the other forms of legacy NetScaler licenses such as Pooled vCPU, CICO, perpetual will not be supported with LAS. NetScaler instances leveraging perpetual licenses without an active maintenance will become unlicensed upon upgrade to the above mentioned software versions.

LAS-based licenses may not be available to customers where prohibited by law or regulations.

If you have questions or concerns, contact Customer Care. Citrix may limit or suspend your Citrix Maintenance for non-compliance with these requirements without liability in addition to any other remedies Citrix may have at law or equity. These requirements don’t apply where prohibited by law or regulation.

This document presents different scenarios of license expiry and connectivity issues behavior in NetScaler MPX, NetScaler SDX, and NetScaler VPX/NetScaler BLX/NetScaler CPX.

Types of Flexed licenses

Software instance (VPX/BLX/CPX, SDX, MPX, VPX FIPS)
Bandwidth capacity

Scenario: MPX form factor

You are using Flexed/Pooled licensing and the licenses are due to expire soon. The following scenarios explain the behavior when a new license is uploaded on NetScaler Console before and after the term expires, or when a license file is not present.

Before the term expires

If the new license is uploaded before the term expires, and the old license is still valid, two different pools of capacity (old and new) are available.

If NetScaler is up and running, it switches to the new Flexed/Pooled license seamlessly after the old license expires.
Restart is not required.
NetScaler does not require a manual capacity reconfiguration.

After the term expires

NetScaler instance stops its normal operations after the license expiry, including configuration loss and complete shutdown of traffic processing.

Scenario: SDX form factor

Before the term expires

If the new license is uploaded before the term expires, and the old license is still valid, two different pools of capacity (old and new) are available.

If NetScaler is up and running, it switches to the new Flexed/Pooled license seamlessly after the old license expires.
Restart is not required.
NetScaler does not require a manual capacity reconfiguration.

After the term expires

NetScaler instance stops its normal operations after the license expiry, including configuration loss and complete shutdown of traffic processing.

Scenario: VPX/BLX/CPX form factor

Before the term expires

If the new license is uploaded before the term expires, and the old license is still valid, two different pools of capacity (old and new) are available.

If NetScaler is up and running, it switches to the new Flexed/Pooled license seamlessly after the old license expires.
Restart is not required.
NetScaler does not require a manual capacity reconfiguration.

After the term expires

NetScaler instance stops its normal operations after the license expiry, including configuration loss and complete shutdown of traffic processing.

Scenarios for connectivity issues behavior

If connectivity breaks between NetScaler and NetScaler Console on-prem server, the behavior is as follows:

NetScaler goes into grace for 30 days.
During this grace period, licensing functionality continues to work until the thirtieth day.
On the thirty-first day,
- NetScaler VPX/NetScaler CPX/NetScaler BLX and NetScaler MPX undergo a forced reboot and become unlicensed.
- The throughput on all the VPX on NetScaler SDX is decreased to 1 Mbps.

The official version of this content is in English. Some of the Cloud Software Group documentation content is machine translated for your convenience only. Cloud Software Group has no control over machine-translated content, which may contain errors, inaccuracies or unsuitable language. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, suitability, or correctness of any translations made from the English original into any other language, or that your Cloud Software Group product or service conforms to any machine translated content, and any warranty provided under the applicable end user license agreement or terms of service, or any other agreement with Cloud Software Group, that the product or service conforms with any documentation shall not apply to the extent that such documentation has been machine translated. Cloud Software Group will not be held responsible for any damage or issues that may arise from using machine-translated content.

Was this helpful

NetScaler Secure Deployment Guide

Scenarios for Flexed or Pooled license expiry and connectivity issues behavior

September 12, 2025

Contributed by:

September 12, 2025

Contributed by:

Scenarios for Flexed or Pooled license expiry and connectivity issues behavior

Types of Flexed licenses

Scenario: MPX form factor

Before the term expires

After the term expires

Scenario: SDX form factor

Before the term expires

After the term expires

Scenario: VPX/BLX/CPX form factor

Before the term expires

After the term expires

Scenarios for connectivity issues behavior

In this article