{"id":13939,"date":"2017-02-11T13:28:02","date_gmt":"2017-02-11T04:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jirak.net\/wp\/migrating-load-balancer-configuration-from-f5-and-citrix-to-nginx-plus-with-our-guides\/"},"modified":"2017-02-11T15:35:01","modified_gmt":"2017-02-11T06:35:01","slug":"migrating-load-balancer-configuration-from-f5-and-citrix-to-nginx-plus-with-our-guides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jirak.net\/wp\/migrating-load-balancer-configuration-from-f5-and-citrix-to-nginx-plus-with-our-guides\/","title":{"rendered":"Migrating Load Balancer Configuration from F5 and Citrix to NGINX Plus with Our Guides"},"content":{"rendered":"

Migrating Load Balancer Configuration from F5 and Citrix to NGINX Plus with Our Guides<\/p>\n

Migrating to the cloud seems to be top‑of‑mind for almost everyone these days. Even if you’re not actively involved in a cloud migration or \u201ccloudification\u201d of existing infrastructure – either because you’re not quite ready, you have legacy and monolithic applications that don\u2019t lend themselves to a more distributed and agile architecture, or there are business and technology reasons to stay on‑premises – you’re still probably talking about it. If moving to the cloud is a even remotely a topic of conversation around your IT watercooler, then breaking ties to legacy hardware appliances is right there with it, hand‑in‑hand. <\/p>\n

Application delivery controllers (ADCs) are often explicitly associated with hardware. The term brings to mind large appliances, some of which take up 16U (almost 2 feet) of vertical rack space – massive, front‑door behemoths that can manage 100% of the traffic entering the data center. The name itself is rooted in the concept of a traffic cop acting as the one master controller of all traffic. <\/p>\n

Software ADCs Are a Better Fit for the Cloud and Modern Architectures<\/h2>\n

Thankfully, not all ADCs are built alike or tied to proprietary hardware. Most use cases don’t really call for such massive, future‑proofed hardware, and software‑based ADCs make more sense where agility is key. Even if enterprises are not moving their infrastructure to the cloud, they’re increasingly adopting more flexible and agile development and deployment methods, and are finding that NGINX Plus provides the features and performance they need for highly available application delivery, while drastically reducing CapEx, OpEx, and even data‑center footprint. <\/p>\n

If you are moving to the cloud, a big point in favor of software‑based ADCs like NGINX Plus is that they can move to the cloud along with your application stack and stay as close to the app as possible. Your cloud vendor is not going to let you move your hardware appliance into its data center, so you’re locked into an on‑premises infrastructure as long as you’re using a hardware ADC. <\/p>\n

Migrating Proprietary ADC and Load Balancer Configuration<\/h2>\n

The question we get most often from customers replacing legacy hardware ADCs like F5 BIG‑IP or Citrix NetScaler with NGINX Plus is \u201cHow do I migrate my complicated ADC configuration to NGINX Plus?\u201d The good news is that it\u2019s extremely easy to translate proprietary ADC rule sets to the NGINX Plus’ content‑routing configuration language, which is much like the familiar syntax for Linux configuration files. <\/p>\n

The even better news is that once you’ve migrated the base configuration, you often don’t need to migrate F5 or Citrix’s complicated traffic‑management rule sets at all. Because NGINX Plus is a purpose‑built reverse proxy and content delivery platform, its configuration syntax is streamlined to represent content‑routing rules as simply as possible, making it possible to collapse or completely remove complicated F5 and Citrix rules. <\/p>\n

Our Migration Guides Get You There Fast<\/h2>\n

We have created two migration guides to walk you through converting your application load‑balancer configuration from F5 BIG‑IP or Citrix NetScaler to NGINX Plus. These guides provide sample configurations in F5\u2019s TMOS control language or Citrix\u2019s NetScaler configuration language, mapping them to the equivalent NGINX Plus configuration syntax. While a working knowledge of F5 or Citrix is beneficial, you don’t need much background or experience with NGINX Plus because the configuration syntax is familiar from Linux.<\/p>\n