You can now experience a Citrix Branch Repeater VPX™ - a virtual appliance that can be used to deliver WAN optimization - for no license cost. With the new Express license model you can configure your very own Branch Repeater VPX .. if you've some XenServer resource handy.

Citrix have previously released their Access Gateway as a Virtual Appliance  - and you still need a license for that - but the Branch Repeater is a different beast. With a few exceptions, Branch Repeater VPX 5.6 supports the same features as a Repeater appliance running release 5.5 software, including:

• Support for the Repeater Plug-in
• ICA acceleration, MAPI acceleration, Windows filesystem (CIFS) acceleration, compression, and TCP acceleration

• Inline, WCCP and PBR deployment modes
• Ability to scale VM resources as needed
• Centralized management via Citrix Command Center (requires Citrix Command center 4.0
• Support for XenServer High-Availability, Resource Pools and XenMotion Live Migration (through Citrix Essentials for XenServer)

While the license is free, you'll still need something to run it on - the system hosting Branch Repeater VPX needs to run XenServer 5.5 or later. Branch Repeater VPX does not require hardware virtualization support in the CPU (though this is desirable). The Branch Repeater VPX virtual machine requires a minimum of:

• 1 CPU
• 1 GB RAM
• 60 GB disk (local disks will give maximum performance)
• 2 virtual NICs (Ethernet ports)

According to the docs, that configuration should handle connections up to 2Mbps - giving you about upto 50 repeater plug-in users and 1000 connections - however if you're going to run the appliance in Express mode you'll be limited to a maximum accelerated sending rate of 512 kbps, 10 accelerated connections, and 5 Repeater plug-ins.

Still - that's not beyond a couple of home users or maybe a remote office.

You can download the device and documentation from your mycitrix account on this link.

To find out more, click use this link