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How To: Upgrade a HA Pair (Part 1 of 3)

In this AskSupport How To video you will learn how to Upgrade a HA Pair Part 1 of 3

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Transcript : Hi. My name is Ronan O’Brien, and today we’re going to be upgrading a HA pair of NetScalers. We have two NetScalers running on 9.0. They are an HA pair. And I’ll just be stepping through the recommended procedure for doing that. So first things first. We need to pull down the build that we want to upgrade to. So the place where we can go to get that. Here we are on myCitrix.com. After we log in, we should have a screen like this. I’m just going to click on Downloads, and we select the product. So, scrolling down to the Firmware section, we can see Release 9.1 Build 98.5. So we have a warning here, or just a notification that this particular release is available for all NetScaler MPX series. As of November 2009, the way a HA pair works is we have a active and passive pair, or, I’m sorry, membership. So, one appliance is active, passing all the traffic. The other appliance does not pass any traffic. It’s simply monitoring the state of the primary box, and it’s ready to step in and take over in a failover event or if the primary disappears off the network. So due to…it could be a switch outage, power outage, so on and so forth. So this is the location where we download the Firmware. It is available in Classic and nCore. Okay. If you have an MPX system, so that would be 15000, 17000, 5500, 7500/9500, or 9700/10500/12500, we have some new appliances which will be coming out. So that isn’t an exhaustive list. But if it’s an MPX system, you may choose the nCore build. Right? So that is also an option. I’ll just be choosing Classic for the moment, because the boxes I’m running this on are not MPX systems. So I’m going to click the Get Firmware. We have the…what we call the lawyer…the lawyer agreement, the EULA. So I’m just going to click Yes. And then we go to the Download Manager, right, to download the file. I’ll obviously click that here if I don’t want to run my Java download manager. It’s my choice. So, while that’s downloading, I’m also going to pull down the documentation as well. So here we have build-9.1-98.5. So that’s version 9.1 Build 98.5. I’m going to put that onto my desktop. I’ll just leave that to…to go downloading in the meantime. So, let’s take a look at the documentation. So I’m going to click on Show Documentation, and we’re going to download this as well. Okay. So we’re going to click on Get Documentation. It’s about 47 MB, and we’ll download that, too. And we’re going to upload that file to the appliance while I’m upgrading. And when I want the upgrade, that is going to deploy PDF files onto the config utility of the appliance. So when you click on documentation, you can be sure to get the latest PDFs. It means you don’t have to go browsing anywhere else on the web. You have the docu…you have all the docs required for this particular build available from your appliance. Okay. This is quite useful. So they’re downloading away. I do…I think already I’ve pulled down those builds already. Just sh…I’m just showing you where to get them on myCitrix. So we can move straight ahead. We don’t have to wait for those to finish downloading. How do we get them onto the appliances? Well, I’m going to use a program called WinSCP. It’s just a secure copy program and quite simple and easy to use. You select New here, for example, and you would type in the IP of…the ns IP of your host. So that’s what (inaudible). Select login. And once we’re connected, like so, I browse to the var ns install directory. That’s where we recommend you put your install files. They must go into the var partition. It’s the only place that has enough space for them, and there’s plenty of space there. But putting them anywhere else on the system outside of var, you might run into space difficulties. So, the way I normally, usually…usually do this is that I sort out…I create directories going by major release. So 9.1. And in here you can create, for example, 98.5. Okay. And there you can see, I’ve already uploaded those files. If I wanted to upload them again, for example, you just have to basically drag and drop them like so. If I wanted to drag them over into that directory, it’s quite simple. That’s how we can upload a build. Note that the docs file..the doc file is already there, as well. Okay? So, here I’m connected to the serial console. We’re doing an upgrade, so it’s always recommended to do this via the serial console. Because we will lose network connectivity when we reboot the box. Okay. And it’s always good to have serial access, just in case we need to do anything. So if the box doesn’t come up, if it isn’t on the network, at least we can see the reasons why. We can look at log files. We still have a grip or handle on the situation. Now, you can see I have a blue screen and a black screen. That’s just to make things a bit easier to see what’s going on. So the blue one we have here is the secondary, I think. Show IP. Yep. So the blue one here is the secondary. The black is the primary. Okay? Just so that’s fairly obvious. So when I’m flipping forward between the screens, you should be able to see what’s going on there. Now, I’ll open up my gooey. I can see here I’ve got primary and secondary. There is a possibility to upgrade via the gooey. Right? We do have that functionality built in, but I personally prefer to upgrade via the CLI and WinSCP. We just have that much more control over it. We are updating the Firmware off an appliance, and I think a lot of vendors would recommend doing it over the CLI if you can. If you don’t have access to the CLI and the…and SCP access, then, by all means, fire ahead and use the gooey. We do have a quite impressive config utility with a very wide range of features. It’s very little that you can’t do with the gooey that you can do with the CLI. Okay. It’s fairly…we’ve worked very hard to have good parity between the two.