A practical step-by-step guide to provide secure remote access using the Citrix Access Gateway VPX

Overview

A complete administration companion guiding you through the complexity of providing secure remote access using the Citrix Access Gateway 5 virtual appliance.
Establish secure access using ICA-Proxy to your Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop hosted environments.
Use SmartAccess technology to evaluate end users’ devices before they connect to your protected network.
Provide a comprehensive solution to secure remote access by implementing Appliance Failover, taking care of your high availability needs.

In Detail

The Citrix Access Gateway can provide full VPN access to you network or simple ICA proxy and we will show you how. No matter how new you are to Citrix or how long you have used Citrix for, we are going learn how to extend the use of Citrix products beyond the confines of your corporate network.

Citrix Access Gateway VPX 5.04 Essentials takes you through the complete process of configuring the appliance. Providing easy to follow guides that you will be able to follow as a seasoned Citrix professional or newbie, we will see you through to the full and complete deployment of the appliance.

Once we have established the license infrastructure we quickly begin on the Access Gateway itself. This runs as a virtual machine so we must import and configure the device. This shouldn’t take us too long and we are ready then to open the web console to see what awaits us in its Adobe Flash driven administration heaven. Our time is going to be well spent here and also, we will spend a long time here so we need to make sure that we are comfortable for the journey that will see us create basic and smartaccess login points; that is, complete access to our networks based on the needs of the user and their role. Not happy with this, we ensure that our work is not destroyed with power outages and we provide appliance failover to ensure the system keeps running. We do not short change you so you will not short change your customers.

Install and configure the Citrix License Server 11.10 into your environment, either the software version or the virtual appliance.
Import the VPX edition of the Citrix Access Gateway and complete the initial configuration from the command line express setup.
Configure ICA-Proxy access to your XenApp and XenDesktop infrastructure using basic login points.
Investigate different mechanisms for deploying the Access Gateway plugins to you user devices including the Citrix Merchandising Server.
Build up the elements to create full VPN access to your internal network whilst maintaining adequate protection from rogue devices using end point analysis implemented using device profiles referenced in SmartGroups.
Publish network resources to be made available to the VPN clients based upon the results of their end point analysis.
Use SmartAccess login points to access the VPN and view remediation messages should we not meet the security requirements of the network.
Monitor the Access Gateway and provide a mechanism to maintain the log files on a remote host.
Manage the high availability of the Access Gateway by implementing appliance failover, two gateways acting as one each monitoring the availability the failover partner.
Access the gateway command line management using SSH.