Citrix NetScaler 12 supports VMware Horizon PCoIP

On April 27th Citrix released the latest version of their NetScaler product, Release 12 Build 41.16. This release enables proxying PCoIP which is the primary protocol used with VMware Horizon. The protocol was licensed from Teradici in 2008, Amazon also licensed the protocol for their AWS offering in 2013. Remote access to VMware Horizon is provided with VMware products like Security server, the new Unified Access Gateway or 3rd party solutions like F5. Many customers are using a Citrix solution as well and with that the NetScaler is pretty common. Until now Citrix didn’t support proxying PCoIP which left customer with no other option than picking a different solution. Now with the latest release the option is there to use Citrix NetScaler to proxy PCoIP traffic. There are a few things you need to understand and my goal in this article is to give clarity. I know that two wonderful guys, Andrew Morgan and Philip Jones are setting up a lab to do the real testing so look out for their blogs on this.

Remote access

First I will go into remote access and VMware Horizon as you need to understand how things are communicating. VMware Horizon consists of a couple of components, They got a broker called the connection server. The connection server can tunnel the connection to the desktop but when you enable that it becomes a SPOF. when your connection server goes down so will all connections provided by that server. That’s the main reason internal connections are never tunnelled. The connection is initially setup over 443 with the connection broker and after the desktop is picked the client will have a direct connection.

Read the entire article here, Citrix NetScaler 12 supports VMware Horizon PCoIP

via Rob Beekmans.net