NetScaler SDX

Consolidation With Sharing of a Physical Port by More Than One Instance

You can enable and disable VLAN filtering on an interface as required. For example, if you need to configure more than 100 VLANs on an instance, assign a dedicated physical interface to that instance and disable VLAN filtering on that interface. Enable VLAN filtering on instances that share a physical interface, so that traffic for one instance is not seen by the other instance.

Note VLAN filtering is not a global setting on the appliance. You enable or disable VLAN filtering on an interface, and the setting applies to all instances associated with that interface. If VLAN filtering is disabled, you can configure up to 4096 VLANs. If VLAN filtering is enabled, you can configure up to 63 tagged VLANs on a 10G interface and up to 32 tagged VLANs on a 1G interface.

In the following example, the instances are part of multiple networks.

  • Interface 1/1 is assigned as a management interface to all the instances. Interface 0/1 is assigned to the Management Service, which is part of the internal 10.1.1.x network.
  • Citrix ADC instances 2 and 3 are in the 10.1.200.x network, and instances 4, 5, 6, and 7 are in the 10.1.3.x network. Instances 2 and 3 each have a dedicated physical interface. Instances 4 and 7 share physical interface 1/7, and instances 5 and 6 share physical interface 10/4.
  • VLAN filtering is enabled on interface 1/7. Traffic for Instance 4 is tagged for VLAN 4, and traffic for Instance 7 is tagged for VLAN 7. As a result, traffic for Instance 4 is not visible to Instance 7, and vice versa. A maximum of 32 VLANs can be configured on interface 1/7.
  • VLAN filtering is disabled on interface 10/4, so you can configure up to 4096 VLANs on that interface. Configure VLANs 500-599 on Instance 5 and VLANs 600-699 on Instance 6. Instance 5 can see the broadcast and multicast traffic from VLAN 600-699, but the packets are dropped at the software level. Similarly, Instance 6 can see the broadcast and multicast traffic from VLAN 500-599, but the packets are dropped at the software level.

The following figure illustrates the above use case.

Figure 1. Network topology of an SDX appliance with Management Service and Citrix ADC instances distributed across networks

topology2

The following table lists the names and values of the parameters used for provisioning Citrix ADC instances 7 and 4 in this example.

Parameter Name Values for Instance 7 Values for Instance 4
Name vpx7 vpx4
IP Address 10.1.3.7 10.1.3.4
Netmask 255.255.255.0 255.255.255.240
Gateway 10.1.3.1 10.1.3.1
XVA File NS-VPX-XEN-10.0-51.308.a_nc.xva NS-VPX-XEN-10.0-51.308.a_nc.xva
Feature License Platinum Platinum
Admin Profile ns_nsroot_profile ns_nsroot_profile
User Name vpx4 vpx4
Password Sdx Sdx
Confirm Password Sdx Sdx
Shell/Sftp/Scp Access True True
Total Memory (MB) 2048 2048
#SSL Chips 1 1
Throughput (Mbps) 1000 1000
Packets per second 1000000 1000000
CPU Shared Shared
Interface 1/1 and 1/7 1/1 and 1/7
NSVLAN 200 200

To provision Citrix ADC instances 7 and 4 in this example

  1. On the Configuration tab, in the navigation pane, expand Citrix ADC Configuration, and then click Instances.
  2. In the Citrix ADC instances pane, click Add.
  3. In the Provision Citrix ADC Wizard follow the instructions in the wizard to set the parameters to the values shown in the above table.
  4. Click Create, and then click Close. The Citrix ADC instance you provisioned appears in the Citrix ADC instances pane.
Consolidation With Sharing of a Physical Port by More Than One Instance