Traditionally, to take advantage of SmartAccess or VPN, along with the new RDP Proxy functionality, Citrix Access Gateway Universal licenses were required. Standard and Enterprise appliances included 5 CAG Universal licenses for testing. Otherwise, ICA Only licensing was included to allow remote access to Citrix but no SmartAccess functionality. The platinum appliances included 100 licenses. If you are a Citrix XA or XD Platinum customer, the CAG Universal licenses were included for as many XA/XD licenses the company owns.
The release notes for NetScaler 11.1 Build 49.16 included an interesting and great change. Standard appliances now include 500 CAG Universal (CCU) licenses. Enterprise appliances include 1,000 licenses, and Platinum appliances now have unlimited licenses. This will allow customers to easily enjoy SmartAccess capability, take advantage of RDP Proxy, and consider VPN use cases for the NetScaler without having to go buy licenses.
Another nice new feature is automatically setting the MaxAAA Users to the number of installed licenses. This was an all-too-common gotcha as customers added CAG Universal licenses. After adding them, there was a requirement to go into the MaxAAA users section and match the overall number of licenses installed. If more licenses were installed later, it needed to be updated again. Now this setting is dynamic and added with the max available. This will definitely save some headaches down the road!
Reach out to Gotham Technology Group to inquire more about how this new licensing can be leveraged, allowing for more capability out of an existing investment.