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Migrating to Pooled Capacity Licensing for Citrix NetScaler

By Preston Stover, Practice Lead, EUC Solutions

By Jason Strout, Senior Technical Consultant, EUC Solutions

With an increasing number of businesses seeking to leverage the benefits of Citrix NetScaler Pooled Capacity licensing, it’s an ideal solution that allows a pool of instances and bandwidth to be distributed to NetScaler VPX (virtual) and MPX (physical) instances, along with SDX/BLX/CPX usage. This permits easy scaling, either by adding/removing or increasing/decreasing capacity, and allocating virtual CPU licenses to VPX instances as required. It offers administrators flexibility to reallocate licensing across sites and instances as per necessity, for both on-premise and cloud-hosted environments.

CDI is equipped to swiftly deploy Pooled Capacity licensing for your NetScaler workloads, ensuring smooth license download, Citrix ADM on-premise or cloud hosting of the license, and distribution to your NetScaler instances.

License Download

1. Verify your citrix.com account access for license download
2. Validate pooled capacity licenses for x instance / x Gbps are available in your licenses portal

Installation of ADM on-prem

1. Note that there is also a free Express edition and paid Advanced edition Citrix Cloud service for ADM which can be used for hosting your Pooled Capacity licenses accessed by ADM relay agents on-prem.  The below steps cover installation of ADM server instances on-prem which does not utilize ADM relay agents.
2. Install 1st ADM node
3. Install 2nd single node on same version with basic system settings
   1. Node IP address
   2. Nsroot account password
4. Configure HA of the 2 nodes (best practice)
   1. Configure original node for HA with deployment .py python script
      1. Log on to VM console as nsroot
      2. Run /mps/deployment_type.py
      3. Choose Citrix ADM Server
      4. Choose No to go into HA setup
      5. Choose Yes as 1st HA node
      6. Restart when prompted
   2. Join 2nd single node to original node to create HA cluster pair
      1. Log on to VM console as nsroot
      2. Run /mps/deployment_type.py
      3. Choose Citrix ADM Server
      4. Choose No to go into HA setup
      5. Choose No as 1st HA node
      6. Specify 1st node’s IP and nsroot account (to join to it with HA)
      7. Specify the floating IP for the HA cluster (you define the floating IP on the 2nd node, NOT on the 1st node)
      8. Restart when prompted
   3. Deploy HA using the GUI (2nd step after CLI setup)
      1. Go to Settings, Deployment, High Availability and click Deploy.  NOTE: the Deployment option will NOT appear in the configuration tree until after HA has been established completely by ADM.  This can take 15-30 minutes and several internal reboots.
      2. Select yes
      3. Wait for 15-30 minutes for the floating IP address to come online (several internal reboots)
5. Add pooled capacity license to ADM
   1. From the ADM console Infrastructure/Pooled Licensing, identify the host ID for license issuance.  Note that this will be the MAC address of the 1st HA node.
   2. From citrix.com, allocate license file to host ID identified previously
   3. Upload the license file
   4. Note the total instances and bandwidth capacity available
6. Add NetScaler instances to ADM management
   1. Go to Infrastructure/Instances/Citrix ADC
   2. Go to the family of NetScaler (e.g. VPX or MPX) and add the instance

Allocate Pooled Capacity to NetScaler instances

1. Note that for existing perpetual licensed instances, the process is a 1-way change to remote licensing.  The instances can not be changed back to perpetual.
2. Specify remote licensing.  Note that this can also be done from the ADM console after NetScaler instances are added to management.  The bandwidth allocation can also be increased/decreased from the ADM console dynamically without instance reboot.
3. Specify instance/bandwidth
4. Reboot
5. Repeat on 2nd node and reboot
6. For MPX nodes, additionally install a zero capacity platform license.  For SDX nodes, there also is a zero capacity platform license installed which is associated with VPX instances and VPX bandwidth.  SDX-hosted VPX instances on deployment are allocated bandwidth.

Wrapping Up

Conclusion Leverage the benefits of Citrix NetScaler Pooled Capacity licensing with CDI’s quick and efficient deployment for your NetScaler workloads. This includes streamlined license download, Citrix ADM on-prem or cloud hosting of the license, and allocation to your NetScaler instances. Your administrators can then harness the significant advantages of Pooled Capacity licensing. Contact CDI today to initiate your journey with Citrix NetScaler Pooled Capacity licensing!