ADC

Licensing overview

Citrix offers a wide range of product editions and licensing models for MPX and VPX appliances, to meet your organization’s need.

For proper operation of a Citrix ADC appliance, it must have one of the Citrix ADC family edition licenses. The ADC product line has three family editions:

  • Standard Edition

    Note

    Standard edition has reached End-of-Sale (EOS) and is only available for renewal.

  • Advanced Edition
  • Premium Edition

For more information, see the data sheet. The data sheet is available on www.netscaler.com. Navigate to Platform > Form Factors > Hardware.

Select a Citrix ADC edition. Then select an MPX or a VPX license offering based on the following criteria:

  • Perpetual and subscription (yearly and hourly subscription)
  • vCPU and bandwidth
  • on-premises and cloud

Citrix ADC VPX Express license

VPX Express for on-premises and cloud deployments does not require a license file, and it offers the following features:

  • 20 Mbps bandwidth
  • All ADC standard license features, except Citrix Gateway and L4 and L7 defenses
  • Maximum 250 SSL sessions
  • 20 Mbps SSL throughput

You can upgrade the VPX Express License to the following two options:

  1. A standalone Citrix ADC VPX license

  2. Citrix ADC Pooled Capacity license for VPX instances. For more information, see Citrix ADC Pooled Capacity.

Important

Clustering is available in Standard edition for VPX public cloud, and in VPX Express license.

Citrix ADC Pooled Capacity license

Use Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) to create a licensing framework that comprises a common bandwidth and an instance pool. For more information, see Citrix ADC Pooled Capacity.

Note:

Citrix ADM can host both Pooled and Self Managed Pool licenses. To use the required license, configure the license server on Citrix ADC and check out the capacity from the appropriate pool. The ADC CLI and GUI configuration steps for the Pooled and Self Managed Pool license are the same.

Citrix ADC Self Managed Pool license

From Citrix ADC release 13.0 build 88.x, Citrix ADC instances support the Self Managed Pool license. With this license, you can simplify and automate license file uploads to the license server. Use Citrix ADM to create a licensing framework that comprises a common bandwidth or vCPU and instance pool.

To use the Self Managed Pool license, configure the license server to the SelfManagedPool license mode on Citrix ADC and check out the required capacity. Use the show ns license command after rebooting the Citrix ADC appliance to find out the license that is configured.

Important

If your system is configured with Pooled Capacity license but want to migrate to the Self Managed Pool license without impacting the traffic flow, ensure that the target server has the required Self Managed Pool license.

You can migrate only between the following compatible licenses:

  • Pooled Capacity to Self Managed Pool, and conversely.
  • vCPU to Self Managed vCPU, and conversely.

To migrate the license, run the following command:

add ns licenseserver (<licenseServerIP> | <serverName>) -forceUpdateIP -licensemode [CICO | Pooled | SelfManagedPool | VCPU | SelfManagedvCPU]

Example:

add licenseserver 192.0.2.246 -forceUpdateIP -licensemode selfManagedvcPU

Configure Self Managed Pool license using the CLI

To add the license server config to the Citrix ADC appliance, run the following command:

add ns licenseserver (<licenseServerIP> | <serverName>) [-port <positive_integer>] -licensemode [CICO | Pooled | SelfManagedPool | VCPU | SelfManagedvCPU]
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Example:

add ns licenseserver 192.0.2.246 -port 27000 -licensemode SelfManagedPool
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Note:

The show ns licenseserverpool command displays only licenses based on the specified license mode. Hence, the licenses are fetched faster. To get an inventory of all the licenses, run the show ns licenseserverpool -getallLicenses command. If the license mode is not specified, the Pooled Capacity licenses are displayed by default.

To modify the system capacity, run the following command:

set ns capacity ((-bandwidth <positive_integer> -unit ( Gbps | Mbps )) | -platform <platform>) [-Edition <Edition>]
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Example:

set ns capacity -bandwidth 3 -unit gbps -edition enterprise
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Note:

Capacity is checked out from the license pool of the license server.

To reboot the Citrix ADC appliance, run the following command:

reboot [-warm]
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To display the state of all the licensed features and configured license mode, run the following command:

show ns license
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Sample output of show ns licenseserverpool command:

`show ns licenseserverpool` command output

Sample output of show ns licenseserverpool -getallLicenses command:

`show ns licenseserverpool -getallLicenses` command output

Sample output of show license command:

show license command output

Configure Self Managed Pool license using the GUI

Complete the following steps to configure the Self Managed Pool license:

  1. Navigate to System > Licenses > ADC License > Manage Licenses > Add New License.
  2. In the Licenses page, select the Use remote licensing radio button, and choose your license mode from Remote Licensing Mode.
  3. Enter the server IP address and the license port details.
  4. Provide the Citrix ADM access credentials.
  5. Click Continue.

Self Managed Pool license

The Citrix Licensing System

VPX licensing on cloud

VPX deployment is supported on public cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google. For more information, see the following documents:

Licensing overview