Hi folks. Its been a while since I posted on here due to work commitments but now that I have a lot more spare time I hope to post a bit more :) 

In this post I am going to cover deploying a NetScaler VPX device using VMware Workstation 11.  VMware workstation is a brilliant tool which can be used for setting up home lab environments without having to deploy an actual server.  Luckily you can deploy a Citrix NetScaler VPX device to most popular virtualisation hypervisors on the market today.  The current supported solutions are:

• VMware ESX (including Workstation)
• XenServer
• Hyper-V
• KVM
• DSD

So lets go ahead and get this set up and running. 

1) Head over to Citrix and download the required products. You can download them from here http://www.citrix.com/downloads/netscaler-adc/virtual-appliances.html

2) Select the required download and unzip it to a safe location

3) In our instance since we are deploying using VMware Workstation we would use the .OVF file to import the appliance into VMware Workstation

4) When you import the appliance you will be asked to provide the name that you wish to call the appliance in VMware Workstation

5) Click the Import button and then it should be imported successfully

6) After successful import we need to power on the device so we can perform the required configuration to get up and running

7) When prompted you need to enter the static IP configuration required for network connectivity. After performing the configuration Press 4 to Save the configuration

8) The NetScaler will now initialise ready to accept HTTP connections

9) You should now successfully be able to connect to the management console using the IP details you just configured

10)  To log into the device you use the default username and password which is nsroot/nsroot.  It is recommended to change the default username and password at your earliest convenience. After logging in you can then perform additional configuration which we will cover in later posts.