Centralized Orchestration and Performance Monitoring

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1 DATASHEET NetScaler Command Center Centralized Orchestration and Performance Monitoring Key Benefits Performance Management High Availability (HA) Support Seamless VPX management Enables Extensible architecture Simplified Installation Intelligent Change Management NetScaler Command Center is a comprehensive management and monitoring solution for NetScaler ADC, NetScaler Access Gateway, NetScaler Application Firewall, NetScaler Branch Repeater, NetScaler Cloud Bridge, NetScaler SDX, and Citrix XenServer. It delivers a unified console for management, and provides real-time performance monitoring of an enterprise-wide application delivery infrastructure. NetScaler Command Center enables IT professionals to easily manage multiple devices, whether they are distributed globally or reside in a datacenter. It reduces operational expenses by automating routine management tasks and centrally monitoring the health and performance of the application delivery environment. Built-in reports for Branch Repeater 6.0 QoS Reporting Application Throughput Link Usage Capacity Increase and Data Reduction Pass through connections and bytes Service Class SDX Management Monitoring VPX Provisioning AppTemplate Group Deployment Supported External Authentication Servers RADIUS TACACS Active Directory(AD) AD group based control NetScaler Command Center Software The NetScaler Command Center product is delivered as a software executable since its inception. The software can be installed on enterprise grade hardware matching minimum system requirements. The server software works on a variety of operating systems and databases, and supports all functional features offered by Command Center.

2 NetScaler Command Center Hardware Appliance The NetScaler Command Center Hardware Appliance is a turnkey solution with preloaded database. It has 500GB of built-in storage and can manage 300 Citrix networking devices. The hardware appliance ships in HA-only mode with two way database replication setup. This eliminates the external database dependency and licensing, and removes the need of additional hardware deployment. It also reduces overall maintenance expenses on hardware and software. Not only does it increases the scalability factor due to advanced enterprise grade hardware, but it also provides more efficient and secure solution being consolidated as a single box business solution. High Availability Setup NetScaler Command Center software and hardware appliances enable you to have a High Availability (HA) setup. It is recommended to deploy Command Center in High Availability setup to ensure there is minimum loss of functionality and there is parallel copy of database. Command Center hardware appliance gets auto deployed with two-way database replication between primary and secondary nodes to avoid loss of data during failover. Distributed Agents Key Benefits NetScaler Command Center Hardware Appliance support 500 GB of built-in storage Capacity to monitor and manage up to 300 Units Advanced performance monitoring and reporting Management of system events and alarms Delegated user administration with complete audit information Application firewall syslog analytics Centralized SSL certificate management Programmatic Interface Distributed Agents Certificate Management To manage and monitor large number of devices, you can set up Command Center in a distributed multi-tier architecture. This is done by configuring Command Center agents to monitor these devices. This architecture reduces the load on the Command Center server by distributing the load across the different agents. In a distributed multi-tier setup, the Command Center server performs operations, such as discovery, trap processing, monitoring entities and syslog messages, and configuration using tasks. The agents are used for monitoring entities and syslog messages, for polling and collecting data used for performance monitoring, such as CPU usage, resource utilization, and IP bytes transmitted, and for certificate management. The Command Center server and the agents are connected to the same database. Programmatic Interface NetScaler Command Center supports NITRO (NetScaler Interface Through Restful interfaces and Objects)APIs. The APIs can be invoked through http/https mode as they are Restful. You can use these APIs in any scripting or programming language. Command Center supports Software Development Kits (SDKs) for Java and C#. Device Discovery Discovery is a process of inventorying Citrix Networking devices. Discovering a device makes it available for management and monitoring. Command Center can organize these discovered devices into user-defined groups with the help of logical containers called maps. These groups can then be displayed in a visual map to add sub maps within existing maps, run custom reports, execute tasks, configure audits, configure NetScaler pool, indicate the actual physical location of a system, along with information such as software version and Page 2

3 licensed features. The Command Center discovery process also archives critical information for each device, providing a convenient back-up mechanism. Fault Management NetScaler Command Center automatically generates a consolidated summary of all application delivery infrastructure events and alarms providing real-time status information for the application delivery infrastructure. Events can be filtered based on userdefined criteria and correlated to generate meaningful administrator alerts, and the severity of individual events can be configured by the administrator. Alerts automatically indicate the severity of a system event, enabling administrators to immediately address the most critical issues. System Requirements Supported Operating Systems Microsoft Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 Microsoft Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition CentOS 5.5 Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4.0 and 5.1 Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4.0 Fedora (POC only) Suse (POC only) RHEL 6 (POC only) Windows 7 (POC only) Supported Databases MySQL 5.1.x with InnoDB storage engine Oracle Database 10g and 11g MS SQL Server 2005 and 2008 R2 Real Time Monitoring You can monitor the real-time status of virtual servers, services, and service group members configured on all discovered NetScaler devices. To further monitor the discovered devices, you can view the device properties, run reports, view events and alarms, execute tasks, run configuration audits, invoke CLI or User Interface of the devices, ping devices or view discovery status. Configuration Management NetScaler Command Center simplifies the management of a Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure solution. An administrator can push a configuration task to multiple devices reducing operational expenses and minimizing device configuration errors. Administrators can create templates, and existing device configurations can be compared to these templates. NetScaler Command Center includes a set of predefined configuration tasks to automate common configuration responsibilities such as upgrading or downgrading software images, managing SSL certificates, and applying new traffic management policies. SSL Certificate Management SSL Certificate Management enables central visibility and management of SSL certificates deployed on NetScaler devices. It lists all certificates with expiry dates. This is where you can centrally renew expired certificates. You can also generate signing requests centrally and configure custom alerts based on expiry periods. Change Management When many NetScaler devices are deployed in the network, it is imperative for an administrator to effectively manage the configuration changes across all devices. This challenge is greater when a large, complex configuration is effected on each of these devices. NetScaler Command Center helps define expected configuration for a device by means of template. It generates audit reports that display details about the type of change, exact time of change, and the user who made the change. It suggests corrective commands that can be applied on the device to ensure the device configuration is compliant with the correct configuration settings. It also provides option to schedule report generation. Page 3

4 Reporting The Reporting feature of Command Center enables you to monitor the performance of discovered Citrix devices by using performance reports and threshold functionality. Command Center monitors the health of a device by polling the performance counters supported by the device. You can generate quick reports about the performance of a specific device and custom reports showing performance data across a set of multiple devices. You can also generate reports for multiple counters from one or more devices. Each quick or custom report consists of three charts, each of which plots a different time interval. This feature also enables you to set thresholds for monitoring the state of discovered Citrix device. You can set a threshold for a specific counter to monitor devices or instances of entities of managed devices. You can also use built-in reports and log messages to monitor security violations encountered by NetScaler Application Firewall. Command Center supports 449 counters for NetScaler ADC and Access Gateway appliances. It also supports 71 counters for Repeater and Branch Repeater appliances. Syslog Analytics Minimum Hardware Requirements Pentium 4, 1.2GHZ, 2GB RAM Disk Space: 20GB+ NetScaler Command Center Client Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or higher Mozilla Firefox 4.0 or higher NetScape 8.1 or higher Google Chrome 7.0 or higher The NetScaler Command Center lets you monitor all critical syslog events generated on your NetScaler device. You can run various analytic tasks on the captured syslog messages. It allows you to search through the log files in various formats which help with quick analysis. AppFirewall Signature Syslog Analytics: This feature empowers you to monitor the security violations encountered by the Application Firewall module. Command Center provides built-in reports to monitor the top security violations, violations encountered by clients, devices, and profiles. You can also view the details of the AppFirewall log messages when a message is generated on a security violation. NetScaler Pools NetScaler pool consists of devices that are considered as one logical unit. All configuration changes are done on all the devices in a pool. The NetScaler Pool Dashboard provides a tabular view of the Virtual IPs assigned to the NetScaler devices based on the priorities assigned to the VIPs. You can perform various operations on a NetScaler pool, such as run a report and execute a task. When you perform an operation on a pool, the operation is performed on all the devices in the pool. This provides the ability for multiple NetScalers to behave as a pool serving common applications. Page 4

5 NetScaler Command Center Hardware Appliance Platform attributes Command Center Platform Processor Intel Xeon L5410 Memory Ethernet ports 8 GB Platform mechanical, environmental and regulatory details 8x 10/100/1000 BASE-T OR 4x 10/100/1000 BASE-T AND 4x 1000BASE-X SFP (fiber or copper) Power supplies Input voltage and frequency ranges Optional DC power supply Power consumption Dual Power Supply VAC full range,47-63 Hz Yes 450w 1536 BTU/Hr Weight, lbs 21 Height Width Depth 1U EIA 310-D, IEC 60297, DIN SC48D rack width with mounting brackets / 55.2 cm Operating temperature 0-40C Allowed relative humidity Safety certifications Electromagnetic emissions certifications and susceptibility standards Compliance 10%-90%, non-condensing UL, TUV-C FCC (Part 15 Class A), DoC, CE, VCCI, CNS,AN/NES RoHS About Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) is a leading provider of virtual computing solutions that help companies deliver IT as an on-demand service. Founded in 1989, Citrix combines virtualization, networking, and cloud computing technologies into a full portfolio of products that enable virtual workstyles for users and virtual datacenters for IT. More than 230,000 organizations worldwide rely on Citrix to help them build simpler and more cost-effective IT environments.citrix partners with over 10,000 companies in more than 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2010 was $1.87 billion. Page 5