Citrix ADC BLX is a software version of Citrix ADC that delivers high performance and a rich set of app delivery and security features to your Linux server. It gives you lightning-fast performance on your Linux server, along with extraordinary configurability. Check out the video below to learn more about Citrix ADC BLX and this blog post to learn how it supports superior performance on Linux.

Citrix strives to deliver innovations that help our customers fulfill their app delivery needs using the Citrix ADC BLX form factor. As part of this commitment to innovation, we recently released an updated build of BLX with the following enhancements that support ease of deployment and usability:

Support for DPDK version 20.11

Support of the new DPDK version for Citrix ADC BLX deployment brings enhanced security, a path for DPDK deployments on public clouds, support for virtual adapters (including containers), and better memory management APIs.

Unification of DPDK and Non-DPDK deployment

This important enhancement simplifies BLX deployment. With this update:

  • You don’t have to compile DPDK sources and set up a DPDK environment before installing BLX.
  • Same parameters in BLX config for DPDK and non-DPDK configurations.
  • BLX DPDK deployment now uses VFIO Kernel module which is in kernel versions later than 3.6.
  • You can leverage DPDK with integer input for cores.
  • Add required huge-pages through parameter in blx.conf.
  • Validate the DPDK arguments much earlier before starting PEs.
  • Automatically detect DPDK and non-DPDK NICs added through blx.conf.
  • No scripts required to make DPDK changes persistent across reboots.
  • Automatically copy the previous configuration on upgrade.

Here are the old and new BLX config files side by side:

SSH Host Access with Single NIC in DPDK Mode

Customers with Single NIC and who deploy BLX in DPDK mode were worried about accessing the Linux host when the BLX needed to have a dedicated DPDK NIC. We solved this by adding two new parameters, introduced in the BLX configuration file blx.conf. These parameters are:

“blx-managed-host”:

  • Default value is 0.
  • When uncommented and set to 1, BLX will provide SSH access to the host’s default namespace. The IP and port on which host is accessible is determined by the “host-ipaddress” parameter.

“host-ipaddress”:

  • Default is commented out.
  • When “blx-managed-host” is set to 1 and this parameter is not provided, the host is accessible on port 9022 of NSIP.
  • The user can also provide an IP (in same subnet as ipaddress of BLX) in this parameter to enable SSH access to host on port 22 of host-ipaddress. Also, along with SSH access to host on port 22, all other ports on the host’s default namespace are reachable via host-ipaddress. For example, if a rsyslog server is running on host’s default namespace on port 514/UDP, it is accessible on port 514 of host-ipaddress once BLX has started.

Learn More

Citrix ADC BLX gives you the feature-rich Citrix ADC as a standalone process on Linux machines. With these recent enhancements its now easy to deploy and manage BLX on a DPDK or Non-DPDK mode. Learn more about Citrix ADC BLX in our product documentation.