30 days of ADM: Day 7 October 08, 2022
Instance advisory scanning tool
I am back, it’s day 7!
You have a bunch NetScalers set up in your London and Madrid data centers (I fancy some sun),and you get asked: How many appliances do we have running 13.0?
What about something on Football? Yikes!!!!!
Your boss then asks, how many appliances have the option to support Intune NAC v2configuration with the new Microsoft Graph APIs?
Yikes!!!!!
It is a simple question (I know, it isn’t) but you start to sweat….and then your remember. Oh yes, let me check the instance advisory and verify that for Mrs.Boss Lady.
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, and Pooled Capacity.
Today is all about the instance upgrade advisory.
Honestly, what are you talking about?
The NetScaler appliance runs a software release that gets updated from time to time. This software version does need to be updated occasionally. This can be due to a software bug in one of the features that you are using, or it could be a new feature that has been added. There are also security updates added in software. The update process is necessary to keep you up to date.
So what? What problem does it solve?
It gives you a single view of what you have deployed where, it also shows very clearly how many appliances you have on what release. It also reminds you, if it was needed to say when certain releases go end of life.
Who would be interested in this?
Anyone who runs a NetScaler for a service, as it allows them to be more flexible with how they service their workloads.
Where does ADM fit in?
ADM will offer the GUI to see the status of your appliances across the whole estate.
What does it look like?
Getting a view of what you have and which firmware release you have is simple. It looks like this:
It also has links to the release notes if you need to check something specific.
Ok, what else?
There is then a link to sort out the instances that might need a bit of TLC
Summary.
Actually, I have been sandbagging, as there is another side to Instance advisory, more on that tomorrow! Ultimately, it’s another killer feature that is enabled with ADM service.
It’s free too, with the ADM service.
What’s not to like?