How To: Upgrade a NetScaler (Part 2 of 2)
In this AskSupport How To video you will learn how to Upgrade a NetScaler (Part 2 of 2)
Tags: technical support netscaler how to
Views: 1,109
Rating: 0
Transcript : Okay. So we’re just opening this up, because when I reboot the box I just want to show you, once I reboot the box we lose connectivity to these windows, but not to our terminal, not to our console switch. I’m just going to step into the directory where I’m uploading that file now. And there we can see our files. Has it finished? Yes, it has. Okay. Now, basically, to upgrade, we just have to type in two commands, and that’s all. No more, no less. So once we have our two files here, our docs and our build, we want to type this file…this command here: tar. Okay? Tape archive. Minus xvzf. Okay. Build 9.0. So, basically, I’m extracting this file, and this will contain a kernel on the install script that we’re going to run. That’s the first command I’ve typed. And now the second command I’m typing is simply installns. Right. And that’s it. So why am I putting a dot-slash here? Just in case there is an installns script which is located in the path somewhere else on the system. I want to make sure I’m running the installns from this particular directory. So I hit Enter. And that’s it. So it’s those two commands. One is the tape…one is the tar command. The other is the installns command. Note that I did not extract the documentation bundle. Okay? The system will do that itself, or the install script will cover that itself. So you can see here, now it’s installing the documentation. It’s extracting those PDF files to the correct location. So when we click on documentation in the config utility, we get the latest docs. And that’s it. So that’s basically the Firmware upgraded. So I’m going to choose…I would normally…well, I always choose “no” here, right, for two reasons. The first thing we need to verify, do we have the correct license, which as of 8.1, yes, we do. The second is, am I happy that the ns.conf is backed up, along with anything else on the system, like SSL certificates. There is one component, one thing we need to be aware of. When we bound the box, as with any, you know, hardware which uses moving parts like disks, a reboot may expose a hardware error. If that is the case, then a system may not boot correctly. And so it’s always a good idea just to make sure that we have a copy of our configs , and they’re on SSL, our SSL search. So I’m just going to show you how to do a quick, a really quick and dirty backup. So I’m going to create a directory here called backup. I’m going to step back here to /nsconfig. That’s the location. You’ll see here that’s just a quick link to /flash/nsconfig. Basically here, we can just grab our SSL folder, pop it over there, along with our ns.conf. Just here. So that’s just real quick and dirty. There’s a few other files there we could backup, but just as I said, it’s a quick and dirty backup, so that we have enough to get us back up and running quickly. So we don’t want to make this screencast too long. So, now I’m just going to type reboot from the prompt, and then let’s see what happens. We can see here PuTTY has shut down. Right? It’s inactive. Gone. My SCP client has shut down. It’s inactive. Gone. And here we…I’ll actually close this down. And here we can see the serial console as the system reboots. Let’s just take a quick…we can take a look at this. At this point, you can see here we’re extracting the kernel. Right? If I hit Control C here, this is the point you can see where the little animated ask the egg timer is going around. If I hit Control C just once or twice here, and then I let the kernel finish extracting, it will then boot into, or it will give us an option to boot into a different mode. I can boot into single user mode, which is, which will give us the possibility if we need to reset the password on the appliance, for example. You’ll find more details about that on our KB if you search for NetScaler password reset. It’s at that point back there, you hit Control C. It’s going to take another minute or so to finish. In the meantime, let’s see what else we can take a look at. Let’s take a look at the config utility. Note this is obviously a different appliance I’m connecting to, because I’m—I’m giving myself three hours here—because obviously we can’t connect to the other appliance before it reboots. Now it’s just going to download the config utility. That will just take a second or two, as well. So first I’ll connect it to this particular box. When the browser does this, we have to download the jar file, which is in effect the config utility. That will take some time. Afterwards, when I reconnect to it again, close my browser, open it up, it will be much faster. It’s just an initial delay as we set ourselves up. There we go. Check here. We’ve now finished booting. I’ll log in. I type show version, and you can see I’m now running on 9.0 Build 70.5. Okay. So this is how to upgrade a standalone system. If you have any questions, we’d certainly like to hear your feedback. There is a question or feedback link at the bottom of the page for the video which you’re watching. Just quickly, I’ll show you where, if you want to upgrade. I click on System here. Okay. So it expands the system node…or I expand the NetScaler node. Okay. Like so. And then we have Upgrade Wizard down here. If you want, you can do it this way. As I said, I prefer to do it the other way. From a support perspective, it’s much safer to upgrade the box when you’re connected with the serial console. So you simply follow through Next and supply the software that you’ve downloaded, you just provide the location, you browse to it, and it uploads the (inaudible)ware, uploads the documentation, and will reboot the box for you afterwards. So just to show you where that is. So that’s it from me for the moment. Thanks so much for watching, and talk to you later. Bye-bye.