We’ve seen increasing traction for NetScaler in customer deployments as they migrate to the cloud. One of the key differentiators for NetScaler is its agnostic approach to supporting application delivery on any cloud. There is tremendous value in being able to deploy a common set of application delivery services that can span on-premises and public cloud infrastructures.
AWS has historically been the predominant player to date in the public cloud space, and one of the useful tools available on AWS is CloudFormation, which enables system administrators and developers to exercise more control of how new infrastructure and resources are provisioned and updated. Think of it like a prescriptive and repeatable series of steps and instructions that allow you to automatically create the same infrastructure stack – every time.
What does this have to do with NetScaler? We now have available CloudFormation templates that can be applied when you’re provisioning a new NetScaler VPX instance. This template significantly decreases the number of steps involved to setup and configure a new NetScaler.
As you would guess, this becomes increasingly important once NetScaler is tied into the application’s Auto Scale backend group. These templates can be sequenced automatically as instances scale, eliminating the need for an administrator to have to manually configure every new instance that is provisioned.
Setting up a CloudFormation template for NetScaler with High Availability:
- Once you’ve created your stack, select “Yes” for the “Create HA pair?” setting.
You will need to specify the IP addresses for the Primary and Secondary Management IP, both of which should be in the same subnet as the Management subnetwork. If left blank, a random available IP address will be assigned from the management subnetwork.
Specify the Management Subnetwork (ethernet0 assigned to NetScaler).
Lastly, setup the Client (client facing VIP) and Server IP (for backend server communications SNIP) addresses, including the related subnetworks (Ethernet1 and ethernet2 respectively).
If you’d like to get started with the new NetScaler CloudFormation template, it can be applied in AWS when you provision a new NetScaler VPX cluster. Stay tuned for more updates and templates that we’ll make available in the future to support additional use cases in AWS.
