Firmware Upgrade a Citrix NetScaler High Availability Pair
In this section we will walk through how to perform a simple firmware upgrade of the our Production NetScalers which are in a HA availability pair.
Upgrading the Passive node first, disabling HA sync, rebooting then confirm the device is OK before forcing a HA failover and repeating the upgrade steps on the other NetScaler.
| Step | Description | Screenshot |
| 1 | Download the latest firmware for Citrix NetScaler VPX | |
| 2 | Open a PuTTy session and SSH to the Passive NetScaler and login as nsroot
Type ‘shell’ |
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| 3 | browse to /var/nsinstall by typing
‘cd /var/nsinstall’ |
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| 4 | Create a new directory called 12nsinstall
Type ‘mkdir 12nsinstall’ |
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| 5 | Open WinSCP |  |
| 6 | Browse to the newly created directory in the WinSCP console /var/nsinstall/12nsinstall
Upload the NetScaler firmware downloaded in step 1 |
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| 7 | When copying completes
extract the tar file type ‘tar -zxvf ./build-12.0-41.22_ns_32.tgz’ |
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| 8 | Stop the replication between the NetScalers | set ha node -hasync disabled
Note: newer versions of NetScaler will do this automatically when they detect a Version mismatch. |
| 9 | Once extraction is complete run the upgrade script
type ‘./installns’ |
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| 10 | Reboot the NetScaler
Type ‘y’ and press enter / return key |
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| 11 | Ensure the NetScaler has rebooted without errors or issues and then failover the NetScalers.
From the NetScaler shell type ‘force HA failover’ |
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| 12 | Repeat all the above steps on the other NetScaler (the now passive server) |
If you want to learn more about Citrix NetScaler check out our online NetScaler course at www.mastersof.cloud
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