F5 APM and need for Citrix Secure/Access Gateway

Yes, APM most certaily eliminates the need for Citrix Access Gateway, as it can perform Secure ICA proxy functionality itself.

Admittedly the docs are not real clear if you're coming at this cold. Just remember that

 

 

1. All APM does is provide you an authentication and authorisation functionality for a VS

 

- Yes there's additional bells and whistles, But these aren't dependent on providing the functinoality you're after

 

 

2. Almost everything else (remote desktop rendering etc) is done by some javascript on the browser.

 

 

3. It's pretty slow to display (i.e. Icons need to be fetched EVERY TIME they're re-displayed. And these are fetched serially which takes about 200-400ms per icon. Lots of icons means you sit & look at a generic icon for a while). It's not APM that's slow, the XMLBrokers really do take a while to get and generate the icondata being requested. This is exacerbated by not caching the icon data (i.e. a browser page refresh means re-fetch them even if you have auto-login enabled on the remote desktop).

 

 

4. If you don't have auto-login enabled, then a browser refresh will make you login to citrix again...

 

 

5. It does actually work eventually. And the more you do it, the easier it becomes for you to work out what it's doing and why... The good news is that if you are clever you can customise everything. Including the javascript which means if you don't like the way it does something, you can change it yourself! It's more like a framework in that respect than an actual product.

 

 

6. Sometimes debugging can be a bit frustrating...

 

 

 

H