NetScaler EOL & Migration
What happens when you have a EOL appliance?
I know what you are thinking.
Christmas is coming and you need to think about gifts.
Christmas is over and it's time to shop! Wow, when does it stop?
Something that I have noticed, is that End Of Life events for NetScaler's tend to trigger a lot of the same questions.
What EOL event are you talking about Andrew?
I'm glad you asked, as this would be a short piece without a bit of interaction! Here is the appliance list:
What does End Of Life actually mean?
What happens on the 1st Jan, other than the odd drink? Most of these appliances are very likely to be running older perpetual licenses. On the 1st Jan the following will apply:
If you have a MPX5550 for example, you will be unable to raise a support case with our support organization. No Support...
If there is a hardware failure, you will be unable to request a replacement appliance and RMA the old one. No hardware support.
Will it just stop working? With the perpetual license it will still run, firmware downloaded from the downloads site will likely still work for some time.
Term-based licenses are tied to an end date, so they will stop working when that time has passed. They have only recently been introduced so are not likely a factor in this EOL event.
What if I give you $? Would you still support me for X amount of time?
Sorry, EOL is an absolute. There are no exceptions. The reason for this is that is there needs to be an end date for hardware. The 5 years of full support is pretty good based on industry averages.
I have a SDX blah blah blah, the Virtual Instance is running 13.1 is that supported?
In this case, if the underlying SDX is EOL, then the platform is unsupportable. It will need to be replaced with a newer SDX.
What should I get to replace X
The table above has some suggested options, the current small physical is the MPX9105, it is available a number throughputs and can also be used with flexed capacity which would allow it to go up to 95Gbps.
There are some other, bigger systems that I have called out too, have a look at the table above.
What other options are there?
We have a Virtual appliance too, the VPX. It runs exactly the same code as the physicals and in most cases could do the job of a physical quite easily. The other consideration is that there might be another multitenant appliance, a SDX system, that might be running with some spare capacity in your DC. It could be an option to spin up an instance on that..
You are only telling me now?
Well, not really, this post is at the end of November 2023, but there was a note posted 5 years ago to say these will be EOL in Jan 2024. If you missed that we also post a Life Cycle matrix, which gets updated pretty often.
You can see that notification on the various appliances here:
The Life Cycle matrix is here.
I just bought X and need to replace that MPX5550, how do I..
In most cases, customers have two appliances working as a high-availability pair. There is a process on Docs that offers some pointers on the process of adding a new system as a second node. This assumes that you have had to do an RMA on one node, the process is here, and this process is a bit more detailed.
If the new box is different, which let's face it, it will be as these will be EOL, the option to sync config will not work. It will be necessary to manually sync the config and SSL certificates manually.
Once the config is over, the HA can be forced for fail over and you can test the new box does what you need. Then bring in the second node and go back to resilient HA.
What else could I use to help with the migration?
NetScaler Console (the platform formally known as ADM) of course! It's able to vacuum up the old config and send it over to the new box!
Summary
This was just a summary of some End Of Life appliances, hopefully, it was useful. Let me know if there are more details needed.
Happy holidays!