In my earlier blog post I discussed the subject of stopping doing certifications. One of the major factors in this decision was because I was using up all my spare time to stay certified in all these exams rather than playing with all this lovely new technology that we have access to in these wonderful times!!  So I have decided to start blogging about stuff which I am not that strong on, not only to teach other people but also teaching you by teaching myself if that makes sense!

So the first subject I will be going through is Citrix Application Delivery Controller (formally known as NetScaler).  I have been working in Citrix environments for over 5 years now and all the projects I have worked on have always had a dedicated NetScaler resource so I will openly admit I have never had much hands on experience. I can tell you exactly how it works etc but if you asked me to design, install, configure or troubleshoot I would be a bit stuck!!

These next series of posts will hopefully help you to fully understand how to perform the basics steps of ADC and how to get it up and running and be confident in its use.  This first post will cover the basic installation onto VMware Workstation to get us started. Future posts will cover further configuration options, deploying via scripts, and potentially configuring onto other platforms (Docker, AWS, Azure, GCP etc).

So let’s started.

Download

You can get a free 90 Day Trial licence from here – https://www.citrix.com/en-gb/lp/try/citrix-networking-vpx-platinum.html#/verifyEmail

You can download the NetScaler VPX Appliance which we need from here – https://www.citrix.com/en-gb/downloads/

Once you have downloaded the file unzip it and store is somewhere you can access is later

Deploy

Once you have extracted the files open them within VMware Workstation.  You will be asked to provide a name for the virtual machine and also a path to store the files.  After you have entered the required details select Import.

The import will now begin

After it has completed you should now see the VM.  Note at this stage if you need additional NIC’s then please add them accordingly.

Configure

Now that the VM has been created we need to start the VM to begin the configuration. You are asked to provide the IP address, subnet mask and the gateway address. Note this is just for core configuration settings.

Once you are happy with the settings then select option 4 to commit the settings. After doing so the appliance will reboot.  After the appliance has rebooted it should report that it is ready for logon

We should then be able to go to the management IP which we configured previously and login via nsroot/nsroot. If you are deploying onto a production network please change this ASAP

So that’s it for the first post in this series. In the next post we will continue the configuration with the intent of performing some basic application load balancing using StoreFront