Almost 3 years ago I evaluated and implemented for my ex company F5 BIG-IP 8950 load balancer; now for my new company I start implementing Citrix NetScaler VPX for our Windows infrastructre (Lync, Exchange and Citrix). Here a short overview how it is integrate in the two data centre’s:
From the first look I like the NetScaler, the CLI is a bit easier to understand from what I think but will see how it goes over the next weeks regarding balancing compare to F5 😉
I like the policy based routing implementation on the Netscaler, here a short example:
add ns pbr mgmt-access ALLOW -srcIP = 10.1.0.200 -destIP = 192.168.0.1-192.168.0.254 -nextHop 10.1.0.254 -priority 10
Access to the 10.1.0.200 will be routed to the gateway 10.1.0.254 even you have a default gateway configured what shows to another direction.
In my set-up you need to configure policy based routing if server in the Windows backend network try to access virtual server IPs in the LB-Transfer network otherwise you have asymetric routing.
add ns pbr VIP-WIND-DC02 ALLOW -srcIP = 10.2.0.1-10.2.0.100 -destIP = 10.1.0.1-10.1.0.254 -nextHop 10.2.0.254 -priority 11