First Look at Citrix Access Gateway 5.0

At the recent Synergy Berlin conference, Citrix announced Access Gateway 5.0. We have confirmed that, as of now, 5.0 is available for download from the Citrix download site – both as an update for the CAG 2010 hardware appliance, and in Access Gateway VPX (virtual appliance) format. (Note: you will need a “mycitrix” account to download the software.)

One of the things I really like about 5.0 is that it now supports running two 2010 appliances in an active/passive HA configuration with automatic failover. This was a serious shortcoming of the original CAG appliance.

In earlier versions, if you were using the Access Gateway as a general-purpose SSL VPN, you could configure HA of a sort within the Access Gateway client plug-in, by defining primary and secondary Access Gateways for the client to connect to. However, if you were simply running the Access Gateway in “CSG replacement” mode to connect to a XenApp farm without requiring your users to first establish an SSL/VPN connection, you had no ability to provide automatic failover unless you had some kind of network load balancing device in front of multiple Access Gateway appliances. That meant, of course, that to avoid having the load balancing device become a single point of failure, you had to have some kind of HA functionality there as well. By the time you were done, the price tag had climbed to a level that just didn’t make sense for some smaller deployments.

NOTE: This specifically applies to the 2010 appliance. The CAG Enterprise models, because they are built on the NetScaler hardware platform, have always supported operation as HA pairs with automatic failover. Of course, a CAG MPX 5500 also carries a $9,000 list price, compared to $3,500 for a CAG 2010.

Now, with the release of 5.0, you can purchase two 2010 appliances (which will cost you less than a single MPX 5500), and run them as an active/passive HA pair. Thank you very much, Citrix CAG team!

Here are a couple of videos from Citrix TV. The first deals with how to upgrade an existing CAG 2010 to the 5.0 software using a USB flash drive, and then set up the basic system parameters:

The second video shows how to configure a pair of appliances for active/passive failover:

You can access several other “how-to” videos by going to http://www.citrix.com/tv, and searching on “Access Gateway 5.0.”

1 reply
  1. Sid Herron
    Sid Herron says:

    I discovered today that there are some clients out there that are not yet compatible with Access Gateway 5.0! If you’re using the Citrix Receiver to manage the various client plug-ins, you’ll need v2.1 of the Citrix Receiver for Windows, which is due out in December. Likewise, for Apple iPhone/iPad, you’ll need v4.2 of the Citrix Receiver, which is due out in Q1 of 2011. Apple Macintosh users will also need to wait until December for the Access Gateway Plug-in for Macintosh.

    Reply

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