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Benefits and Uses of Admin Partitions

Dec 09, 2015

You can avail the following benefits by using admin partitions for your deployment:

  • Allows delegation of administrative ownership of an application to the customer.

  • Reduces the cost of ADC ownership without compromising on performance and ease-of-use.

  • Safeguards from unwarranted configuration changes. In a non-partitioned NetScaler, authorized users of other application could intentionally or unintentionally change configurations that are required for your application. This could lead to undesirable behavior. This possibility is reduced in a partitioned NetScaler.

  • Isolates traffic between different applications by the use of dedicated VLANs for each partition.

  • Accelerates and allows to scale application deployments.

  • Allows application-level or localized management and reporting.

Let us analyze a couple of cases to understand the scenarios in which you can use admin partitions.

Case 1 : Admin partitions used by an enterprise

Let us consider a scenario faced by a company named Foo.com.

  • Foo.com has a single NetScaler ADC.
  • There are five departments and each department has one application that requires to be deployed with the NetScaler.
  • Each application must be managed independently by a different set of users or administrators. 
  • Other users must be restricted from accessing the configurations.
  • The application or back-end must be able to share resources like IP addresses.
  • The global IT department must be able to control NetScaler-level settings which must be common to all partitions.
  • Applications must be independent of one another. An error in configuration of one application must not affect the other.

A non-partitioned NetScaler would not be able to satisfy these requirements. However, you can achieve all these requirements by partitioning a NetScaler.

Simply create a partition for each of the applications, assign the required users to the partitions, specify a VLAN for each partition, and define global settings on the default partition.
Case 2 : Admin partitions used by a service provider

Let us consider a scenario faced by a service provider named BigProvider:

  • BigProvider has 5 customers: 3 small enterprises and 2 large enterprises.
  • SmallBiz, SmallerBiz, and StartupBiz need only the most basic NetScaler functionality.
  • BigBiz and LargeBiz are larger enterprises and have applications that attract a lot of traffic. They would like to use some of the more complex NetScaler functionality.

In a non-partitioned approach, the NetScaler administrator would typically use a NetScaler SDX appliance and provision a NetScaler instance for each customer.

This solution suits BigBiz and LargeBiz because their applications need the undiminished power of the entire non-partitioned NetScaler appliance. However, this solution might not be as cost effective for servicing SmallBiz, SmallerBiz, and StartupBiz.

Therefore, BigProvider decides on the following solution:

  • Using a NetScaler SDX appliance to bring up dedicated NetScaler instances for BigBiz and LargeBiz.

  • Using a single NetScaler which is partitioned into three partitions, one each for SmallBiz, SmallerBiz, and StartupBiz.

    The NetScaler administrator (superuser) creates an admin partition for each of these customers, specifies the users for the partitions, specifies the NetScaler resources for the partitions, and specifies the VLAN to be used by the traffic that is destined for each of the partitions.