How To: Upgrade a NetScaler (Part 1 of 2)
In this AskSupport How To video you will learn how to Upgrade a NetScaler (Part 1 of 2)
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Transcript : Hi. I’m Ronan O’Brien from the Citrix Tech Support Readiness Team. Today we’re going to upgrade a NetScaler from Version 8.1 to 9.0. The first thing we have to do, is we have to download the correct build. To do that, I’ve logged on to myCitrix.com. I’m going to select Downloads. And from here we choose NetScaler from the dropdown. Now we choose our Firmware version. So I’m scrolling down through the list. And here we are at the Firmware section here. Right? In this particular case, I’m going to choose Firmware Release 9.0 Build 70.5. So we have a warning message here just letting us know that this is not compatible with some of our brand new MPX devices. We need to go straight onto 9.1 for those. So, we have lists here of different features, enhancements we have for this version, and then we get down to the build itself. So here is the build that we need to download. You’ll notice it has a .tgz or tgzed extension. So I’m just going to choose download. And this starts our Download Manager. I’m just going to click past the lawyer text, and then we go to the download link. So I can choose to download the file with that download manager by clicking here. Or I just click here to use the java download manager. So I choose the location just to get on my desktop. And there we go. Build a 9.0, 70.5. So that’s downloading right now. I can close this window. And I’m also going to download the documentation. This is an optional step, but the advantage of getting this is that, once we install this along with the build on the myCitrix…sorry…on the configuration utility, there is a documentation link. And by installing the documentation, as well, it means that you get the latest documentation installed on the appliance itself. So I’m going to choose this, too, and save this to the same location. So now you can see in the Download Manager we have two of them downloading away happily. So the first thing I’m going to do is log on to my appliance. So, because it’s an upgrade, it’s always safer if we can log on through the serial console, okay, or the console port. The reason for that is that, if anything does happen to go wrong, at least we can…we’re still connected to the box. Okay. We can still…it gives us a get out of jail free card if there’s a typo. If you make a typo when you’re installing it, or anything like that, you can give support a ring, and we can help you recover a system. Once it’s off the network, and you’re not physically located near the appliance, then it’s a bit more difficult. So I’m going to connect now to my console port. I’ll log in, and I’ll type: show version. Now we can see we’re running NetScaler 8.1 on this particular system. So I do have these files downloaded. I know it’s not quite finished downloading yet, but I have them ready just to save some time. And now I’m going to connect to the WinSCP. I’m just going to get the IP address of this box. Okay. So I’m now going to connect with WinSCP. So this is a tool you can download from WinSCP.org. It’s basically a secure copy client. So how you connect to your appliance using this. I’m going to type New, type in the IP address, the Username, the password, and just click…notice I’m just leaving this here at SFTP (allow SCP fallback) and click Login. And that’s it. So we’ve now connected, and we’ve now copied files from my workstation here onto the appliance itself. So I’m going to go into var ns install. That is the recommended directory for putting these install files. Okay? We don’t choose to put them in anywhere else. It’s just handy. It’s easier for us to work with you if there is any incident, to recover the box if you place all the install files here. So I’m going to go into 9.0. Going to create a new folder here called 70.5. As you can see, it’s all organized here going by version and build number. And here are our two files. So I’m going to copy over the documentation and the Firmware upgrade. So that’ll take a few minutes. And the next step, yeah, well, let’s just talk a little bit while this is uploading. There is a possibility to also upgrade via the gooey. Okay. There is an option in there. I personally prefer to do this using the CLI and SCP. It just gives me a little bit more confidence. I can make sure that there’s no network outage or anything like that in the middle of an upload, and you’re also connected to the device during the upgrade. You can also see the reboot sequence afterwards. Okay. So after we’ve upgraded, we need to reboot the system. And with the serial console connected, we’re still able to view all the boot messages and any diagnostic messages that we need to look at. Okay. So, from a support perspective, that’s my preference. There’s nothing wrong with upgrading via the gooey or the config utility, but, you know, it is a network appliance and usually they may be located in different locations away from you. So they can be located in data centers, or you don’t have direct physical access. So in that case, it’s always nicer to have the comfort of having serial console access to it. So this build file has almost finished uploading, and I’m now going to use a program called PuTTY. You can see here, I used this to connect to the serial console. This is basically…my serial console is done over tal.net. So if I open PuTTY, I can see I’m using tal.net here and the port. Okay. So if I want to connect to the SSH client, I’ll connect to the SSH server or daemon, using PuTTY as the client. We choose SSH as a protocol, and I can log in like so, as well.