Netscaler Knowledgebase

We are experimenting with limiting outbound connections to an Internet resource and wanted to confirm we are doing things the right way.  Our goal is to ensure that our entire network infrastructure does not flood a site (e.g., google.com) with more than N connections at once.  For example, we would like to make sure that no more than 4 connections to www.google.com are  open at any one time.

We understand that we can possibly do this by creating a service for the site (e.g., www.google.com) and then specifying max clients for that service. (e.g., 4)  We would of course ensure that all outbound requests go through our NetScaler, so that the throttling can occur. 

Does this sound like the right way to do things?  Also, is there any configuration we need to set to ensure that connections above our max are queued until a slot opens up?

You are asking for the right way. I don't think it is the right way to use the NetScaler for outbound traffic control.

If you have the fear that you site could attack some other sites with to many requests or traffic, then I think you should implement some other device who can control traffic in a better way.

When you want to create a local vserver for www.google.com, do you then want manipulate internal DNS for www.google.com to your vserver ip?
Even if that works, you have to check when the google.com ip addresses are chaning. Because IPs are like smoke and mirror. ;-)


Marco