by Ray Davis

How to automate NetScaler ADC firmware upgrades from NetScaler ADM

ADM (Application Delivery Manager) is neat, and Citrix did a fantastic job on the product. One of the things I would like to do is automate scheduled NetScaler firmware upgrades. With Maintenance Jobs in ADM, you can.

Below is a quick guide on how to achieve this for an MPX HA pair:

Networks>Maintenance Jobs>Create Job

For me, it’s a HA pair. Select “Upgrade Citrix ADC/Upgrade Citrix ADC HA”:

Give it a name and add the NetScaler’s instances for the Upgrade Job.

Select them here:

Choose the file share of the location of the Firmware:

You now have two options: execute now or later. You can schedule this around change control times.

For “Now,” it looks like this. They must be set one hour apart. Meaning, it will upgrade the one now @ 1:27 pm, and then the other device will start at the selected of 2:27 pm.

The “Later” option looks like this:

You can see here that it has started already for the “Now” Job I created earlier.

Let’s look at the executive summary and see what it did.

So, it actually followed the steps as if you were doing things the manual way.

The secondary is completed.

Let’s check the new firmware version. This looks correct.

It sent me an email, and this is what the report looks like:

In the Job summary, it will show you this:

Now in 50 minutes, it will do the primary. As I was at a meeting, it upgraded this. So this confirms, it does what it states. 🙂
So let just show some screenshots:

Let’s check the other Node!

My time slot above was a time frame around creating the blog. I had already created it prior and the times below are the same as far as the 1-hour difference, but just not what I showed in the example above. But I am sure you get the idea.

As you can see this is some cool stuff, and It can do way more than this. Hopefully, if time permits, I can show you more in the ADM realm.