In this release, Pulse Secure Services Director supports secure authentication for administrators, and is also made available as a Long-Term Support release for extended operations. Highlights include: LDAPS  Authentication for Administrators   - Services Director now supports authentication for administrators over both LDAP and LDAPS. The software can be configured to require that connections to a remote LDAP server are SSL-encrypted using either the STARTTLS or LDAPS mechanism. In addition, Services Director is able to configure managed instances of Pulse vTM to use LDAPS or STARTTLS using the centralised access profiles.   Long-Term Support release - For customers who prefer longer support cycles to support their operational model, Pulse Secure is identifying Pulse SD 20.1 as an LTS (Long Term Support) release. As a result, support for Pulse SD 20.1 will be available for three years after the release date. For more information, please refer to the release notes, available on the download portal. A complete set of user documentation is also available on http://pulsesecure.net/vadc-docs including getting started guides, installation, configuration and API reference documentation.    ... View more

As global organizations are embracing flexible workstyles, more users than ever are looking for an enhanced user experience and service resilience when working from home. With BYOD and an evolving mobile workforce distributed across many locations, achieving Secure Access for the whole organization can be a daunting task. With the addition of Pulse vADC to the Pulse Secure Access Suite, the combined solution harnesses the productivity boost needed to maximize an organization’s return on investment (ROI). Pulse vADC solutions helps you build dynamic applications which are more resilient, more secure, and more responsive at global scale. This article gives a quick three-step guide to how you can download Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager, including how to download the Community Edition of the software, and shows how you can provide Business Continuity using Optimal Gateway Selection to keep your users connected 24x7, and how you can use Pulse vADC load balancing to boost the performance, utilization and security of Pulse Connect Secure appliances. Complete information on how to get started with Pulse vADC, including installation guides, documentation and more is available on the Get Started pages. 1. Download Pulse vADC The quickest way to get started with Pulse vADC is to download the Community Edition of Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager. This will give you access to all the features you need to try out Pulse vADC software, both for local load-balancing of Pulse appliances, and for building out always-on access for global and mobile users. Whether you are clustering Pulse Connect Secure (PCS) appliances together at a single location for performance, or linking multiple locations into a single virtual Secure Access service, Pulse vADC lets you build a layered secure access infrastructure, which can be adapted to meet your own policies to support work-from-home and business continuity policies. See this article for more information about installing and configuring Pulse vADC. 2. Optimal Gateway Selection Do you need to improve the productivity of mobile users? Pulse vADC makes it easy to implement Optimal Gateway Selection (OGS), so that users are automatically connected to the nearest available application gateway. For example, using Pulse Connect Secure for mobile access and home workers, OGS will check the service availability at each location, and then redirect new sessions to the nearest location, helping your business stay online.   Using DNS-based load-balancing, OGS uses geolocation to determine the nearest available gateway, and return the CNAME of the nearest gateway to redirect new sessions to the optimal location. In the background, OGS keeps track of the service health at each location, to ensure that new sessions are routes appropriately. OGS can even be customised to implement your own business policies, and even check license headroom at each location to ensure that sessions are evenly distributed between nearby locations.   You can use the built-in OGS Wizard for simple configuration, or else you can download the Deployment guide for Optimal Gateway Selection here. Alternatively, Pulse Professional Services can help to create custom policies, such as shielding login screens against credential stuffing, and blocking sessions during times of high workloads. 3. Load-Balancing Remote Access Solutions How do you optimize the performance and utilization of application gateways? Do you need to balance sessions evenly across platforms of different sizes? Pulse vADC provides even distribution of sessions, even when server appliances and gateways have different sized capacity. For example, using Pulse Connect Secure, Pulse vADC will check the health of each appliance, and balance license usage across each appliance in the cluster, steering traffic towards lightly-loaded appliances, increasing the utilisation of PCS appliances and licenses. Using smart local load balancing, Pulse vADC can test the health and license usage at local PCS appliances, and route sessions in real time across the cluster, Pulse vADC applies session persistence even when used in a large cluster of appliances, and can even apply service protection methods such as shielding login screens against credential stuffing, and blocking sessions during times of high workloads. There is a built-in Wizard for load-balancing PCS appliances, or you can download the Deployment Guide for Optimizing PCS. You can also configure custom policies for service protection, or apply weighting to ensure even distribution between different-sized appliances.   ... View more

We recommend that you do not post external hyperlinks for logfiles to the Pulse Community, because external hyperlinks and images are often trapped by our content filter. If you have a particular problem, then it is ok to post a short extract to help identify the problem, and then a moderator may request for more detailed information to be sent as a private message.   Alternatively, if you have an urgent problem, your IT team can raise a support case directly with the Pulse Secure team.   ... View more

In this release, Pulse Secure  Traffic Manager offers some additional capabilities to support secure authentication for administrators, and functions to assist in building custom policies for Global Load Balancing. This release will also benefit from Long-Term Support for customers looking for extended operations. Highlights include:   LDAPS  Authentication for Administrators  - Traffic Manager now supports authentication for administrators over both LDAP and LDAPS, configured through  the System > Users > Authenticators admin page. The new ldap!ssl configuration key can be used to require that connections to a remote LDAP server are SSL-encrypted using either the STARTTLS or LDAPS mechanism. TrafficScript support for GLB workloads - In this release, Pulse vTM includes a new Traffic Script function glb.service.getLocationLoad() which can be called from within a custom script to inspect the workload at a given location. In addition to the built-in algorithms for distributing global traffic, this new function gives more flexibility when writing custom algorithm for a Global Load Balancing Service that needs to access the workload at a GLB location. The workload must be set by an external monitor using the setLoad() API call: if not set, this new function will return the response time (in ms) of the health monitor on the service. Using this function allows TrafficScript rules to query the workload from the dataplane without impacting performance. In this simple example, the rule will give priority to available locations with a workload below a given threshold: $locations = glb.service.listLocations(); foreach( $loc in $locations ) { $load = glb.service.getLocationLoad($loc); if(glb.service.isLocationLive($loc) && $load < $max_load) { glb.service.preferLocation($loc); } }   Long-Term Support release -  For customers who prefer longer support cycles to support their operational model, Pulse Secure is identifying Pulse vTM 20.1 as an LTS (Long Term Support) release. As a result, support for Pulse vTM 20.1 will be available for three years after the release date. For more information, please refer to the release notes, available on the download portal. A complete set of user documentation is also available on http://pulsesecure.net/vadc-docs including getting started guides, installation, configuration and API reference documentation.     ... View more

In order to support our new Certified Technical Expert training course for Pulse vADC, we have created a demonstration package which contains files to support the training course, and allows you to set up your own demo environment which runs on your laptop in a Docker container environment, and includes deployment files for each of the demo sessions.   All you need to get started is access to a Linux virtual machine (eg, Ubuntu 18.04 on your laptop), and the instructions included in the ZIP file show you how to download and install Docker and Terraform. From there, the demo package is able to download the Pulse vTM Community Edition and other resources from the Docker Hub, and follow the documentation in each module to run each of the demos:   Deploying a simple service with Traffic Manager Use a simple TrafficScript rule to re-write content Web content caching SSL decryption and offload More complex TrafficScript examples, and performance management using a Rate Class Another TrafficScript example to log an alert when there is a spike in traffic Global load balancing   Download the demo package (attached to this article) to learn about how to install Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager in a Docker Container environment, configure simple services including SSL offload and content caching, and try out some cool TrafficScript examples - and use Terraform to deploy all those services automatically. Files to download:   Demo package files and instructions Attached to this article: pulse-vadc-demosville-v3.5.zip Terraform Provider for vTM hosted on on Github; At the time of writing, the latest version is terraform-provider-vtm_v7.0.1 For more information on training courses for Pulse vADC or any other Pulse Secure solution, see the course details here, or email our Education team at education@pulsesecure.net.   ... View more