30 Days of ADM: Day 26 October 21, 2022
Time travel options with ADM..
I am back, it is day 26.
At some point, there is going to be an option for you to do something crazy. On reflection, it did not seem that crazy at the time. Hindsight gives us 20/20vision!
I just want the option to go back in time and make it work again. I don’t care if the computer said no.
HG Wells eat your heart out, we have this!
You have been selected for a training course in Citrix ADM, the goal is to provide you with enough information to be actually dangerous when talking to a customer or client. 30 days is a bit of an arbitrary number, but I am prepared to give you 2minutes of material, can I get 2 minutes of your time?
I have talked about Fleet management, general analytics, security analytics, AI / ML, Stylebooks, Pooled Capacity, instance advisory upgrade, security advisory, Autoscaling, onboarding, RESTful API, CADS self-managed, Service Graph, Web Transaction Analytics, Config Jobs, Network Reporting, SSL Dashboard, RBAC, event handling, config drift, WAF learning, the overview & Gateway insights dashboards, On-Prem vs cloud ADM and A+SSL ratings
Today is all about Time Travel!
Honestly, what are you talking about?
Is time travel an ADM option? Really? Ok, if anyone can make backup and restore sexy, I can do it!
Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes it is not even something you were expecting. What is better, is the option to bring everything back to the point before you made that catastrophic change.
Rescue me!
So what? What problem does it solve?
Enterprise clients tend to have something called a change board. Managing change is all about risk and recovery from issues. Every time a change is submitted to the change board, they want to know the fallback position if everything goes wrong. Somehow, they have been there before.
Getting the system back to a known good state cannot be overstated. Time travel is still cool.
Who would use this?
Almost any customer uses a few different NetScaler appliances within their infrastructure hosting services. That’s everyone, right?
What does ADM offer to help this?
Naturally, the console has some options to do a backup of a NetScaler (the appliance formerly known as Citrix ADC).
Once you choose the option it opens another screen. There are a bunch of options depending on what you need. Do the backup, grab a copy of a previous back(download it), or transfer the backup file off from ADM. This transfer option is handy as the backup files can get really large impacting the disks on ADM.
Automate the backup!
However, when there is limited time, automation can help set up a back backup schedule. For security, the backup file can be password protected too.
The schedule options are either ‘interval based’ or on a ‘time schedule’. For example, that could be every 12 hours or at midnight every day. There is also an option to pick up on SNMP traps and backup on ‘NetScalerConfigSave’, this is a more event-triggered automation option.
It is also possible to transfer the backup off from ADM as part of the schedule, this way you can head off storage issues.
Limitations?
One of the things about backup and restore is that it does not allow the option to backup NetScaler A and restore to a different appliance B. The reason is that each backup includes the details of the NICs and so they will be different for each appliance.
Summary
Getting away to roll back can be a lifesaver, this is just one less thing to worry about when it comes to infrastructure management. You never know when you might need to go back to a known good version. This all helps keep things running smoothly.
All of this will help you stay on top of your environment. With tools like this, you can save time and ensure that you get back to high-value tasks.
Ultimately, it is another killer reason to run ADM as a service.
It is free too.
What’s not to like?