How to deploy Citrix NetScaler VPX on Nutanix AHV

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Kees Baggerman·Senior Technical Director at Nutanix – Former Citrix CTP – NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor – 15+ years in EUC

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As I’m working on a solution note for Citrix NetScaler VPX on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) I was looking to deploy the VPX on AHV and not completely coincidentally Ronnie Hamilton asked me if I had some tips on how to deploy the NetScaler VPX on AHV which was enough reason write a new blogpost.

Nutanix AHV is Citrix Ready for the Citrix NetScaler VPX, meaning that we can use this virtual appliance to run on Nutanix AHV. Basically we can use the KVM appliance that Citrix offers at their download site to run on Nutanix AHV:

After downloading this file (TGZ) you can extract it with WINRAR and store it on your server. Next you can upload the .raw file to your Nutanix AHV cluster using your favourite SCP program (I’m using WinSCP here), note that the port is not 22 but 2222:

You can store the file anywhere on the Nutanix Distributed File System (Nutanix DFS), in this case I’ve used the folder ‘/ImageStore/NetScaler’ to store the .raw file in. After the upload you can easily use the following steps:

• Login to Prism
• Go to ‘VM’
• Click ‘Create VM’
  • Assign a name for the VM
  • Add the number of Cores/Processors
  • Add the amount of memory you want to assign
  • Add a NIC in the correct VLAN
• Add a disk
  • Select ‘Clone from ADFS File’
  • Select ‘IDE’
  • Type the path of the .Raw file (Pro tip: <TAB> will autofill the path.
• Click on ‘Save’

If you power up the VM now you’ll see that the NetScaler VPX will boot and give you a login prompt:

While this works without a problem, I rather go for the Acropolis Command Line (ACLI) using the following commands I can remove the need for clicking around in the GUI:

vm.create netscaler01 memory=2G num_vcpus=2 num_cores_per_vcpu=1
vm.nic_create netscaler01 network=vlan.64
vm.disk_create netscaler01 bus=ide clone_from_adsf_file=/ImageStore/NetScaler/NSVPX-KVM-11.0-63.16_nc.raw

Hopefully this will help you deploying the Citrix NetScaler VPX on Nutanix AHV.

[Update]

As David Collier has noticed we removed the serial port from AHV, this causes the NetScaler VPX for KVM to stop booting, running the following command adds the serial port to the VM:

vm.serial_port_create <VM Name> type=kServer index=0

My colleague Mike Umphreys was loading up a Citrix NetScaler VPX on AHV earlier today and ran into the following error when logging on via the console:

“No such file or directory”

Turns out that you need to remove the CD-ROM drive of the VM, if you remove the CD-ROM drive and you start the NetScaler VM all is good again.

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Kees Baggerman

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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Kees Baggerman

Senior Technical Director at Nutanix - Former Citrix CTP - NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor - 15+ years in EUC

Kees Baggerman is Senior Technical Director — Performance & Solutions Engineering R&D at Nutanix, where he leads a global team responsible for defining how enterprise applications are delivered on the Nutanix platform. A former Citrix Technology Professional and NVIDIA Enterprise Platform Advisor, he has spent 15+ years driving EUC strategy and technical direction across architecture, product, and customer success. He has been writing here since 2011 — sharing what he learns at the intersection of platform engineering and enterprise IT.

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