Site Local GSLB with Citrix ADC

If you know anything about GSLB, you likely know that it is nothing more than a DNS trick that allows you to programatically return an IP (or CNAME) for a name based on service health or proximity to a location. But you may not know that you can also use GSLB in conjunction with Link Load Balancing to ensure that internal resources are highly available. What is Link Load Balancing (LLB)? Link load balancing is … Read more…

Installing Citrix ADC (NetScaler) on Proxmox

A few days ago, I did a thing and one of the first issues I had was getting a NetScaler (Citrix ADC) appliance up and running on the new host…because, you know….priorities. This scenario is certainly supported as the hypervisor is KVM, but on the initial boot, it got stuck here: And that’s no good. How did we get here? Let’s go through the basics as it’s slightly different than just importing an OVF template. … Read more…

NetScaler Authentication Error – /cgi/selfauth

While I was rebuilding my lab, I ran into an issue when building out my demo Exchange OWA front-ended by NetScaler – the error was pretty generic, I would attempt to access the OWA page, was then prompted for authentication by the NetScaler AAA engine running as a part of Unified Gateway, then I was dumped to the following error page: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable – /cgi/selfauth/xxxxx This error page is being presented by the NetScaler, … Read more…

Demo NetScaler Datastream with SQL AlwaysOn

Is your database application not performing as well as it should? Is your SQL Server running low on resources? Is your application not written to take advantage of SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups or database sharding? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then NetScaler Datastream to the rescue! Or, maybe you are looking to demo NetScaler Datastream to get a better idea of what capabilities it has in your SQL environment. If that is … Read more…

Homelab: A few weeks with XenServer and Nutanix

Earlier this month I completely re-worked my homelab – with both storage and hardware upgrades as well as the underlying hypervisors. If you’re interested in the changes made, see this post here. So how has the experience with the new gear been? In no particular order, here’s my notes: Miscellaneous Not having to burn 8+GB for a vCenter VM is nice – especially for a lab XenCenter console is far simpler and less of a resource … Read more…

Upgrades to the Lab: Local SSD and Hypervisors

Take a look at the #HomeLab hashtag on twitter, and you will see lots of technology experts that have some pretty extensive lab environments at home – add me to that list. OK I’ve been on that list for a while…my lab has gone through numerous iterations: Started with Hyper-V initial release (2008 – KB950050) Ran StarWind Virtual SAN for a while – great performance offloading cache to RAM Moved away from local storage to SAN\NAS … Read more…

Demo NetScaler App Firewall (WAF)

Ever want to try out the feature of the NetScaler known as Application Firewall (AppFW or simply WAF)? Or maybe you need to demo NetScaler App Firewall for one of your customers, but are not sure of the best way to show it off? Well, that’s understandable because App Firewall is powerful and demoing it can be a bit tricky. In this post I’ll cover two of the biggest hurdles in showing off AppFW: Working … Read more…

Citrix Supportability Pack – UPM Configuration Check

Citrix Supportability Pack tool highlight: User Profile Manager UPM Configuration Check The Citrix Supportability Pack was made available late last year (2015) and is meant to be a single location for all the tools you might ever need to troubleshoot an issue in your Citrix farm – and by farm, I mean any of the components of the installation: XenDesktop Legacy XenApp Printing Graphics Web Interface …the list goes on Think of this as a … Read more…

NetScaler Unified Gateway – Native Receiver

NetScaler unified gateway is one of the great new features in NS version 11. If you’ve worked with some of the more advanced features, then you may be familiar with one of the more common requests: Make a NetScaler Gateway (CAG) the target vServer of a content switching vServer. Fortunately, this is exactly what Unified Gateway does – essentially, Unified Gateway is a content switching vServer with one of the possible target vServers as a non-addressable … Read more…

Citrix Storefront 3.x Configuration Tool

Anyone that has deployed Citrix StoreFront in the past has likely needed to manually edit the web.config files for either customizations or advanced functionality that simply wasn’t available in the StoreFront GUI. In fact, Citrix has released a ‘StoreFront web GUI Assistant‘ that allows you to import then modify the web.config files – it was updated October 30, 2015 to support StoreFront 3, but it really didn’t support any of the more advanced features, and … Read more…