In today’s complex Web sites, you may want to present different content to different users. For example, you may want to allow users from the IP range of a customer or partner to have access to a special Web portal. You may want to present content relevant to a specific geographical area to users from that area. You may want to present content in different languages to the speakers of those languages. You may want to present content tailored to specific devices, such as smartphones, to those who use the devices. The Citrix® NetScaler® content switching feature enables the NetScaler appliance to distribute client requests across multiple servers on the basis of specific content that you wish to present to those users.
To configure content switching, first create a basic content switching setup, and then customize it to meet your needs. This entails enabling the content switching feature, setting up load balancing for the server or servers that host each version of the content that is being switched, creating a content switching virtual server, creating policies to choose which requests are directed to which load balancing virtual server, and binding the policies to the content switching virtual server. You can then customize the setup to meet your needs by setting precedence for your policies, protecting your setup by configuring a backup virtual server, and improving the performance of your setup by redirecting requests to a cache.