NetScaler® Console service

Pooled capacity

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: will support LAS 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.

Pooled capacity in NetScaler is a licensing framework that comprises a common bandwidth and instance pool that is hosted on and served by NetScaler Console. From this common pool, each NetScaler instance in your data center, regardless of platform or form factor, checks out one instance license and only as much bandwidth as it needs. The license file and the bandwidth are not bound to the instance. When the instance no longer requires these resources, it checks them back in to the common pool, making the resources available to other instances that need them.

Note

In NetScaler Console, one of the agents is the license server.

This licensing framework maximizes bandwidth utilization by ensuring that instances are not allocated bandwidth more than their requirement. The ability of the NetScaler instances to check licenses and bandwidth in and out of a common pool also enables you to automate instance provisioning.

You can increase or decrease the bandwidth allocated to an instance at run time without impacting traffic. You can also transfer the licenses in the pool from one instance to another.

Pooled capacity