by Marius Sandbu, CTP, Norway CUGC
Yesterday Citrix released new VPX editions to the public, which is now showing the true power of NFV, which is something it showed a bit earlier this year being able to push a single VPX to 100GB! –> https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/02/18/netscaler-vpx-hits-a-new-100gbps-high/
Also a new low level model was introduced as well the VPX 25, which is to bridge the gap between VPX10 and 200.
And five new top level models were introduced which is
- VPX-5000
- VPX-8000
- VPX-10G
- VPX-15G
- VPX-25G
Which gives a lot more throughput than the previous high-end model which was the VPX-3000.
Now some important notes about these five new high-end models. As of now VPX10G, 15G and 25G are only supported on ESXi 6.0, and they can be configured with between 2 vCPU and 12 vCPU (10 vCPU for the 10G edition). If you choose to add a vCPU you should add additional 2 – 4 GB of memory as well. The VPX5000 and 8000 are supported on ESXi 5.5 and 6.0 and can be configured with between 2 – 6 vCPU.
NOTE: You need to have built 11.65.72 in order for these models to function and license them.
The VPX-25G needs to be configured with SR-IOV on ESXi to be supported for the high amount of throughput, and it can be configured with up to 16 vCPU. Take note however that as of now there is only one supported NIC, which is the Intel 82599 10g NIC. You can read more about configuring SR-IOV on ESXi here –> http://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/11/getting-started-with-vpx/install-vpx-on-esx.html
The supported maximum numbers for the 25G is
- 25 Gbps throughput
- 6,200 SSL transactions/sec with 2048 keys
- 15 Gbps SSL throughput
- 9.5 Gbps Compression throughput
- 6100 SSL/VPN concurrent VPN users
Citrix has already updated the VPX datasheet with the new models –> https://www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/documents/products-solutions/citrix-netscaler-vpx-data-sheet.pdf
Happy load balancing!
