Citrix Unified Gateway Series – Part 1 – Citrix Unified Gateway Initial Setup

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I this blog series I am going to walk you through the set-up and configuration of Citrix Unified Gateway on the Citrix NetScaler 11 platform.  This is a new concept for access if you are used to using NetScaler Gateway of old and have multiple access portals allowing access for your various end user devices.

This series is going to get deeper and deeper into the configuration of NetScaler with Unified Gateway showing you what you can really achieve with this new release as well as some more advanced concepts of deployment when your infrastructure requires it.

So, lets get on with it…

Assumptions

This article assumes that you have a licensed NetScaler v11 running and you have web access to the management GUI.  It also assumes that you have a Certificate uploaded, and authentication policy defined.  If you need any help setting these up then please refer to one of my previous articles on building a NetScaler Gateway, this will walk you through the set-up for these parts of the build.

Part 1 – NetScaler Unified Gateway Initial Set-up

Log into your Citrix NetScaler Management Portal and locate the Unified Gateway option on the left side of the screen.

Click on Unified Gateway and you will be shown a welcome screen.  Click Get Started

You will be shown a brief overview of the Unified Gateway Architecture.  Click on Continue

Fill out a name for your new NetScaler Unified Gateway and give it an IP Address.  This will in fact be the IP Address for the Content Switch and not the NetScaler Gateway itself, but we will look at this in more detail later on.

Click continue and select the Certificate you want bound to the new Unified Gateway

Click Continue.  At this point you will be prompted about the certificate chain.  ensure that you have uploaded the entire chain and linked the certificates except for the Root Certificate.

Click Continue and select the LDAP (or other authentication method) policy you wish to be bound to the Unified Gateway

Click continue and select the Portal Theme you with to use for the Unified Gateway

Click Continue to add the Application Settings to your portal.

Click the plus button to add a new Application

In this case I am going to add access to a Citrix XenDesktop Site fronted by Citrix StoreFront

Fill out the details for the StoreFront service and click Continue

Fill out the Desktop Delivery Controller Details and click Continue.

NOTE: In the below example I have put a tick in the Load Balancing check box.  This is just to show you the load balancing options – in a production environment you would probably want to load balance your controllers and use the vIP to connect to the service.

Click Continue, check the configuration details and click Done if you are happy with them.

Click Continue to confirm that you want the NetScaler to go ahead and build the Unified Gateway

Wait a few moments and the Citrix NetScaler wizards will run through and create your new Unified Gateway for you.

That’s it built!

If you navigate to NetScaler Gateways you will see your new gateway up and running.  Please don’t be alarmed that it does not have an IP Address.  This is now sitting behind a Content Switch that will handle the IP Address part of the equation.

If you navigate to Content Switches you will see that the wizard has created a Content Switch for you with the IP Address that you assigned to the Gateway during the initial phases of the Wizard Set-up.

If you now open a browser you will be able to navigate to your dns name that is pointing to the Content Switch IP Address and you should see the NetScaler Unified Gateway login prompt

Login to the gateway and you will be prompted with the client choices screen

Select Client less Access and you will see the portal where you can add SaaS, Intranet and Web Links (Covered in Part 2 of this series)

Log out and log back in but this time select Virtual App and Desktop Access

This will pass you through to the Citrix Receiver for web hosted on your StoreFront Servers (assuming you have setup the NetScaler as part of the StoreFront deployment)

Don’t worry about the branding – this will also be covered in a later article in this series.

That’s it!  Part 1 – Initial Set-up of Citrix Unified Gateway.  I have to say that I think Citrix have done an excellent job of the UI and Wizards for release 11 of NetScaler, they are way more user friendly and rarely break down in the set up process.

In Part 2 we are going to Cover adding Web / SaaS and Intranet applications to the gateway to allow your users to use client-less access to unify there access to web applications and portals.

Hope this had helped some of you out.

Laters,

b@m