Category Archives: Application Delivery Controller

Building an IT Employee Experience Scorecard

Consider this an evergreen post as of 22/09/2020

Introduction
I smile consistently these days hearing how organisations are keeping the UK economic moving forward, pivoting day 1 of the UK COVID-19 lockdown to full-time frictionless secure remote flexible working styles with minimal IT effort + friction powered by Citrix technologies.

I hear many unconsidered benefits from my customers, examples include keeping businesses operating helping their customers and supporting them during the height of the lock down to leap frogging competitors gaining significant market share through to winning new business because operationally they where available and ready with a Citrix powered securely centralised hybrid multi-cloud delivery strategy, when backed with a robust and annually tested Business Continuity Plan (BCP) set them up for instance successful shifting from day one of the UK COVID-19 lockdown to full-time work from home without any major hiccups.

For organisations that weren’t fully Citrix and had a hybrid strategy achieved full work from home swiftly swell using one or more of the following strategies:

1. Many existing hybrid Citrix customers scaled up licensing and re-framed physical workstations sat in the office through Citrix Workspace app to employees now sat at home using a browser on a personal device at home. To the employee everything is where it should be within there virtual desktop, for many this has now fundamentally changed perceptions of why they need to sat in an office for 5 working days in a post COVID-19 non-lockdown world.
2. Scaling up CVAD usage by optimising existing workloads or unlocking dark capacity turned off and deallocated ready within the data centre wherever they choose that to be.
3. The most popular one was to extend into one or multiple public clouds (AWS, Azure) to supporting elastic Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (CVAD) workloads whilst remaining in control of public cloud cost economics utilising Citrix AutoScale – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops-service/manage-deployment/autoscale.html which is part of the CVAD Service.

Finally organisations shifted to focusing on strengthening security within 1-2 weeks, implementing contextual device security powered by Citrix Smart Control and Smart Access technologies beyond IT non-managed devices, as not every employee could take a device home, they didn’t have a device they could use or they just didn’t have the physical space for it at home as you just don’t know your employees WFH requirements, needs and including @home personal circumstances behind closed doors.

In these many organisations hearing all these great stories I noticed a common theme reoccurring in lock down months 1-2. I have a percentage of employees and its all abeit random across the entire organisation encountering good vs. fair vs. poor experiences. Due to the random nature pin pointing the issue was a huge challenge as by the time IT investigated the problem it was largely self-resolved if by magic? My response have you heard about and or deployed and are running Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM)? A resounding NO 95% of the time. The below diagram 1 visualises the traffic flow of where I am vs. where my delivered Citrix Virtual Desktop is run out of, it likewise can visualise to IT the overhaul traffic, load demand, security & infrastructure health status ref diagram 2.

Diagram 1

“Not visualising the employees “Workspace” traffic flow, is where the value of Citrix and ANY Workspace solution is LOST in IT Service delivery. Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) is a key enabler in helping remediate employee experience issues, whilst providing a crucial IT Employee Experience Scorecard.” Lyndon-Jon Martin June 2020

The Business IT Value of Citrix ADM
A modern flexible platform with two unique halves much like our human brains with left vs. right hemispheres connected by a nervous system, however in this case ADM has analytical vs. management hemispheres providing fleet management with different roles vs. function; employee, security & infrastructure insights supported by a hybrid multi-cloud architectural strategy enabling less IT Ops friction and complexity on a daily basis. ADM’s centralised management + sense architecture provide simple and or advanced operational experience scorecards for auditors (PCI/DSS/ISO27001 with RBAC for read-only access), security + network teams, IT and Citrix System Administrators alike from a single framed lens who’s nervous system is connected to a hybrid multi-cloud fabric providing unconsidered insights and visibility into capacity, strengthened security posture through monitoring change control and config drifts incl automated fleet management which can be executed across multiple instances in ANY cloud simultaneously or on your own terms. ADM gives IT back the right level of “Control” enabling the less friction shifting workloads with true licensing flexibility + agility to the most commercially attractive vs. the most innovate cloud platform which suites IT and their business demands.

Diagram 2

Having had the privilege of working with world class engineers in the past helping a single customer to process a £1 million pounds per minute through a payment gateway beyond typical web, app traffic of a front door of there website. I learnt that you always require something that you as the MSP or your customer can “Control” in an ANY Cloud + Services architecture for Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and sound IT Operational excellence so you can make better decisions at pace from more accurate data insights visualised. Placing your “Eggs” aka IT Business platform into a single supplier framework even the most trusted IaaS provider and enforcing that your preferred IaaS region is properly fault tolerant and highly-available is equally expensive in cost and complexity much like on-premises, do not be fooled. The IT Complexity Index increases significantly when consuming for example IaaS native site recovery services to enable near to real-time failover in another region when your primary region experience’s an (planned) outage or degraded performance, these services help to keep-a-live those existing “Sticky” connections which will eventually complete a transaction of some kind e.g credit card donation.

I’m all for public cloud in fact two operating styles “Native” vs. “Managed” Public Clouds strategies. I’ve ran my personal lab in AWS EC2 since 2016, easily amortised £1000 over these past 4 years with plenty of cashflow free. Really? How? Having a strong background + experience in the MSP world on the edge of the City of London and working with “Managed” Public Clouds platform I began to respect + understand how all IaaS providers operate inclusive of the full lifecycle management of workloads + the data centre platform itself which is to not leave everything on like you do at home or in a traditional managed colocation data centre. In a native vs. managed IaaS world you’ll turn off and deallocate capacity if you don’t require it and scale it up as you equally require it with little to no friction. I’ve digressed enough back to the IT Employees Experience Scorecard.

A number of my customers have overcome that randomness or pockets of employees complaining about a poor experience post deploying Citrix ADM as the issue can now be identified and remediated pretty efficiently. The solution is simple, deploy and run Citrix ADM for up to a week continuing as is, no changes and then run a report similar to the above and in parallel visualise all those support cases from your service desk platform and marry up employee names and you’ll quickly notice a pattern forming between employees with poor experiences vs. support cases + the number of them.

I suggested to organisations survey those employees and ask them a few simple questions the best ones “Who is your home broadband provider?” and the second “How many devices are connected in the house to the internet and number of people?”. The first question revealed what I expected its the employees consumer ISP and the suggested remediation could well be provide them a “stipend” exclusively for mobile data onto personal contracts or ship them a 4G mobile hub/dongle to use instead and the problem vanishes over night almost every time and video conferencing platforms perform better as a net result equating to happier employees with a better experience.

The second question is about understanding what is happening within the home and as a result tweak or deploy a new HDX policy which again almost every time the employee experience was significantly improved. An example is switching out “Thinwire” – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/1912-ltsr/graphics/thinwire.html for “EDT” – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/1912-ltsr/technical-overview/hdx/adaptive-transport.html or visa versa. You can Optimise the “EDT” HDX protocol bandwidth over high latency connections – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/1912-ltsr/technical-overview/hdx/bandwidth-connections.html as its roots are entrenched from the “Framehawk” protocol which was originally engineered from the ground up to deliver a better experience with macro rising increases of spectral interference and multipath propagation, you can learn more about that by reading this article – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/1912-ltsr/graphics/framehawk.html. An important note you should be actively using the “EDT” protocol with or beyond 1912 LTSR if you want something like “Framehawk“.

Getting Started with Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM)
It can be consumed as a Citrix Cloud Service – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-application-delivery-management-service.html or you can deploy a customer owned and operated platform – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-application-delivery-management-software/13.html.

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Citrix.

Deploying a Hyper Responsive Web Service with(out) NetScaler?

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Citrix.

Shortened Names
CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK – cdn
SECURITY ASSERTION MARKUP LANGUAGE – saml
FEDERATED AUTHENTICATION SERVICE – fas
LOAD-BALANCING – l/b
NETSCALER UNIFIED GATEWAY – nug or netscaler ug
NETSCALER – ns
XENAPP – xa
XENDESKTOP – xd
XENAPP/XENDESKTOP – xad
INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER – isp
MANAGED SERVICE PROVIDER – msp

Introduction
Yes I will be talking about Citrix NetScaler only here as I am a Citrite, this blog post is more about methods vs. technical guidance so lets begin. In a previous life prior to my current role at Citrix I worked for a managed Internet Service Provider (mISP) or MSP where the customers I used to manage where required to deploy app, database & web servers (infrastructure) to service + support customer transactions at a massive scale but also ensuring a fast vs. efficient user experience at scale vs. normal usage. Today I am go explore how to optimise the delivery of web-based service fronted with(out) a Citrix NetScaler from startup to a global organisation we all can’t live without!

My scenario will focus on taking a web based service that you’ve developed as a start-up running on a single VM at instance type of any size running LAMP to be a continually hyper responsive web service as the load increases or popularity of the web service by first implementing simple but very effecting SysAdmin techniques. Your company is now born you’ve found a niche in a market segment/vertical and you’ve adopted a framework for development to build your web service platform on and you’ve identified where to host vs. run your web service from.

Optimising your Web Service to be Hyper Responsive with(out) NetScaler

You can deploy a successful vs. highly available web service without any ADC yes that is right, however there does come a point when its right vs. relevant and you will need to implement an ADC like Citrix NetScaler. So how can you? Well it comes down to thinking like a SysAdmin sometimes how can I optimise by removing stuff vs. consolidating roles or migrating them to alternative platforms.

Lets examine your Web Service that we’ve just launched its currently a single VM instance for argument sake its hosted in a public cloud like AWS vs. Azure vs. GCP or even a private cloud perhaps running on a XenServer host :-). You’re happy and believe your ready to begin your journey with your new startup so you begin promoting it socially on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram e.t.c and slowly over a few weeks the demand for the web service begins to grow steadily and you notice that the responsiveness isn’t 100% what it was a the time of launch so you schedule a maintenance window at say 04:00 GMT and scale up the VM instances compute resources to 4vCPU and 24GB of RAM including attaching another SSD HDD and you shift the content e.g images, CCS style sheets and JQuery files onto this HDD to improve performance by shifting I/O Reads for content onto another HDD.

Customers
☺		 EDGE
↔		 Web, Database & Content Roles running on a single Web Server
■

Happy days your web service is now back to that 100% (Initial launch experience) but now fast forward a few more weeks vs. months and your web services popularity increases organically vs. social and traditional marketing campaigns so your back to its not quiet as responsiveness anymore vs. isn’t 100% what it was a the time of launch so you schedule a maintenance window to perform some careful real-time investigation work to understand where are the bottle neck(s)? Each Web Service today in my personal opinion will have difference bottle neck(s) this is down to how its developed to run (standard alone vs. h/a cluster vs. globally distributed) vs. coded (framework vs. ground up framework) so careful monitoring of your web service platform from inception to the current date and the future is critical to help you continually truly scale your web service.

After reviewing the gathered insights from various tool(s)* you can see that the number of Reads to the HDD is quiet high and all to often I have seen decisions made to shift the database away from the web service onto another VM instance without checking what service is responsible for all those Reads and what location on the HDD the Reads are occurring from!? In my personal experience its mostly like not the database BUT the content e.g images, scripts, stylesheets that cause the high I/O Reads on the HDD when serving up content to load the web pages for customers on there end-points however with proper coding of your web service you can reduce this by caching the content on the users device (Laptop, PC, Mac, Smartphone, Tablet, Thin client) so when they change web pages there isn’t a hit on the web server (look at NetScalers HTTP Compression technology aswell) for the exact same content BUT only for what has changed perhaps image(s) of items they you want to acquire including its price + title + description collected from the database e.g change of search or click on the next/back buttons of there found vs. filtered results.

At this point you can do one of three things (1) you can migrate the database to an external VM instance and change the web service to connect to the database on now a remote server which is most commonly down without proper investigative work (2) if your in a public cloud you could choose to utilise a PaaS database service this option is not for everyone in my personal opinion just yet and its not necessarily a technology vs. security adoption blocker but I believe its a analytics blocker if the public cloud provider chooses to come into my market and also its way to NEW for me most common theme (3) keep the database exactly where is it and begin to or shift to delivering your Content via a CDN model or sometimes referred to as an Image Farm i.e the bits that make your website look good and the way it looks e.g images, logo, CCS style sheets, JQuery scripts that provide functionality + experience. This approach will help improve the users overhaul experience at any stage because the content is delivered via CDN model or method – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network (Example www.youtube.com) and not via the web server servicing up the webpage(s) from the web service anymore and typically the responsiveness of web service leads to a better experience for customers and there satisfaction goes up using your web service! This approach free’s up vital compute + I/O resources on your web server running your web service. Visit your favourite online retailer, ISV e.t.c and view the HTML source you’ll see what I mean! Most organisations typically don’t implement this earlier enough and often will implement this strategy after the ADC is deployed as the right vs. relevant skillset for managing your web service at scale simply is not available within the business yet.

Customers
☺		 EDGE
↔		 Web & Content Roles on single Web Server
■		 Database Role on separate remote Server
■

Happy days! Your developer suggests to implement lets just keep it simple Round-robin DNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS so that he can make the web service multi web server enlightened e.g clustering so after some tests he/she deploys the new code onto the PROD web server and deploys 1-2 more web servers completes his tests and implements and deploys Round-robin DNS. Personally this is NOT something I would ever implement as if you don’t manage your DNS correctly with someone who knows what they are doing you could fall victim to DNS cache poisoning – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_spoofing or worse and bye bye web service = bye bye business! In a previously life prior to Citrix working at a mSP DNS management was taken very seriously for customers as without it your business would not be available online and the net outcome is simple you cannot transaction business to turn a profit and keep shareholders happy! Back to the blog so you know have a cluster enlightened web service platform to give you scale although its not prefect in my personal opinion with this strategy.

Customers
☺		 DNS
Round-robin DNS		 EDGE
↔		 Web & Content Roles on Web Server
■ ■ ■		 Database Role on separate remote Server
■

Happier Days lie ahead as more bottle necks in your web service have been resolved and the web service is becoming even more and more popular with customers in the particular City vs. County that you initially launched the web service from BUT now as more time passes and the business continues to growth from strength to strength, month on month you once again notice that the responsiveness isn’t 100% what it was a the time of launch vs. the last architectural change(s) that where made to enlightening web service platform and that you choose to switch the database to a remote VM instance, and I also am going to assume you did not implement the CDN concept for content (images, CCS, scripts e.t.c). So your business is now profitable and at a level where you have on-boarded the right vs. relevant skillset within the business to help take your web service to the next level i.e regional vs. GEO vs. global scale or you hire in external but experienced ADC professionals to help with the re-architecture of your web service platform or your go Serverless (Follow-up article!) but we’ll leave that one for todays post as its another blog post all on its own.

Upon investigation utilising various *tools (Network, Cacti, SmokePing, TOP e.t.c.), reviewing historical data points vs. graphs the decision is made that your web service platform now needs to adopt an (NetScaler) Application Delivery Controller (ADC) to scale smarter, intelligently and more efficently on-demand as the business grows while also ensuring high-availability 99.xxxxx% (You choose your 9’s) uptime 24/7/365 and to also maintain that initial customer experience during your startup phase or day 1 trading of business. In my view when implementing an ADC correctly the responsiveness should equal at scale if not be better than that first time you deployed your web service. At this stage most likely dependant upon the web service (What is it? game platform vs. online store e.t.c) you’ll potentially implement the following architecture to easily support a GEO or a region(s) within a GEO e.g EMEA or global scale and remove that Round-robin DNS method!

Content via CDN
☺		 Customers
☺		 EDGE
↔		 NetScaler ADC
□ □		 Web/App Servers
■ ■ ■ ■ ■		 Database Servers
■ ■
Content Servers
■ ■

What is NetScaler?
It’s a Layer 4-7 networking appliance https://www.citrix.com/networking/ that allows for securing and acceleration of workspace, web and app workloads while remaining transparent to customers. It comes in many different flavours vs. roles from providing secure BUT contextual remote access for SaaS, Web apps, virtual apps & desktops, R/A VPN with end-point scanning, microVPN e.g XenMobile apps e.t.c to virtualising your WAN by bonding multiple internet uplinks together through to supporting and monitoring a deployed web service(s) at local, regional, GEO or global scales all the while also providing deep insight and analytics into your organisation see the below video and much much more.

So Why Implement a NetScaler?
Implementing an NetScaler has many benefits it allows for offloading of TLS or HTTPS traffic https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/ssl.html freeing up vital compute resources or cycles spent on decrypting the traffic where as now the web servers running your web service can have greater scale as they are now free to get on process transactions, monitor the health – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/load-balancing/load-balancing-builtin-monitors.html of each web server that is load-balanced (l/b) – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/load-balancing/load-balancing-how-it-works.html by NetScaler and if one or more web server(s) are performing poorly it will receive less transactions until it becomes more responsive, Datastream – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/datastream.html enables connection multiplexing to your database servers e.g more efficient writes + reads means faster transactions which means better performance of the web service with a net outcome of better user experience for customers, if don’t use the CDN concept for content take a look at the integrated cache feature – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/optimization/integrated-caching.html which allows the NetScaler to store and serve specific content saving a request to the server holding the desired content this further improving the responsiveness of your web service, support for Googles SPDY (Speedy) https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/optimization/spdy.html and or implement HTTP Compression – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/optimization/http-compression.html which compresses responses from servers to compression aware-browsers example – https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/optimize-encoding-and-transfer even enable and allow SAML and OAuth – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12/aaa-tm/oauth-authentication.html logins to now only SaaS apps but also Windows apps used inline with FAS within XAD 7.9+. The list goes on and on so be sure to check out the NetScaler online documentation at – https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/12.html and remember NetScaler is an advanced ADC but can also do the following Secure Web Gateway, Web AppFirewall, Unified Gateway and SD-WAN.

My Best of #CitrixSynergy 2017

The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Citrix.

Shortened Names
CITRIX USER GROUP COMMUNITY – cugc
HYPER CONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE – hci

Introduction
Its my 5th #CitrixSynergy and this is def one of the best Synergy’s I have ever had the privilege of watching virtually from London, England. Why not in person? I prefer to watch virtually as I am to consume more content faster and translate that into content to update Citrix partners/customers in a timely manner at high level and tech deep dive where required in particular areas or topics. Finally this blog post will most likely change over the next 2-3 weeks as I consume all of the Synergy 2017 content as when/how I can.

My Highlights of the Key Notes
Vision Keynote

– 4:45 Citrix User Group Community – https://www.mycugc.org THANK YOU! Join the community today its powered by some of the most passionate Citrix and Technology advocates from around the global!
– 11:00 Red Bull Racing I’m not going to say anything you need to watch it!
– 21:45 Cloud powers the world
– 27:00 Digital Frontier Companies
– 39:00 Citrix Secure Digital Workspace with a software-defined preimeter
– 40:57 Citrix Workspace Services and a brief demonstration by Citrix’s CEO
– 42:25 SD-WAN / Gateway / WebApp Firewall / DDoS (NS 12+) as a Service
– 47:35 Citrix Analytics Service
– 1:01:00 “Better Together” and video message from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
– 1:12:25 Citrix + Google Chromebook (Skype for Business, Office365 and much more…)
– 1:18:00 Healthcare customer story “Partners Healthcare”

Technology Keynote

– 22:00 Unified Workspace (its Adaptive and Contextual by device/location and it changes the users published resources and its access type!) which brings together some of the most crucial aspects of todays modern apps, desktops, data & your location in a single view with casting capabilities but not demoed as instead instead*
– 29:00 *Workspace IoT (SmartSpaces) demonstration with a users own mobile phone enables an auto login to a Win 10 VD at guest location including welcoming the user based upon his/her smart phone used as there identity. Security people feel free or you will be going nuts right now!
– 32:30 Its all about layering you guessed it Citrix App Layer enabling IT to say YES! Note demo was demoed using a Samsung DEX check it out – https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2017/03/29/instant-desktop-computing-from-the-new-samsung-galaxy-s8-smartphone/
– 39:40 Workspace Appliance Program e.g HCI
– 42:35 Protect against Zero day attacks with XenServer and BitDefender which is available but is something which Citrix announced on 21/06/2016 yes thats right 2016 entitled “A Revolutionary Approach to Advanced Malware Protection” – https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2016/06/21/a-revolutionary-approach-to-advanced-malware-protection/ 21/06/2016 yes 2016!
– 47:00 Brad Anderson Corporate Vice President of the Enterprise Client & Mobility @Microsoft discusses shortly and then prefers to demonstrates our joint Citrix + Microsoft “Better Together” capabilities in Mobility, Virtualisation delivery from Azure and more.
– 1:01:38 Digital Jungle discussion its def worth your time if you about security and managing the experiences of your users workspace!
– 1:47:25 Vision of how the Digital Workspace is going to evolve

Citrix Synergy TV Breakout Sessions
The following are my current top sessions to watch in no particular order that I believe you’ll gain a lot of value out of watching BUT note that this may change as I continue to consume more of the on-demand content from Synergy 2017.

– SYN318 A to Z: best practices for delivering XenApp, XenDesktop – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnnZTKBy18c&feature=youtu.be

– SYN111 – What’s new with Citrix Cloud and what’s to come – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-UunHGKqLY

– SYN120 – NetScaler SD-WAN updates – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdqIkCb86uU

– SYN103 – Citrix App Layering – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBYoVeAYnSA

– SYN118 – What’s new with NetScaler ADC – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMefjGwRMeU

– SYN121 – What’s new with NetScaler Unified Gateway – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovb4TIb5JY&t=28s

– SYN115 – Why should I use ShareFile if I already have Office 365? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kESgKT7_mJw

Innovation Super Session
Awaiting for the on-demand video publication but for now I will leave you with the following Tweet as a thought or rather a reminder to make sure that you watch it if you missed it!

Synergy 2017 Advocates Blog Posts
Citrix Synergy 2017 – It’s a Wrap – See all the most important announcements listed here! By Christiaan Brinkhoff. – https://blog.infrashare.net/2017/05/29/citrix-synergy-2017-its-a-wrap-see-all-the-most-important-announcements-listed-here/

Upgrading a NetScaler 10.5.x.n Virtual Appliance to NetScaler Unified Gateway 11.x.n

The following content is a brief and unofficial prerequisites guide to upgrade from NetScaler Gateway 10.5.x.n to NetScaler Unified Gateway 11.x.n prior to deploying in a PoC, Pilot or Production environment by the author of this entry. The views, opinions and concepts expressed are those by the author of this entry only and do not necessary conform to industry descriptions or best practises.

Shortened Names
VIRTUAL APPLIANCE – v/a
NETSCALER GATEWAY – nsg
NETSCALER UNIFIED GATEWAY – nug
VIRTUAL IP ADDRESS – vip

Deployment Preparation Overview (DRAFT & MAY CONTAIN ERROR(S))
The following is an upgrade process that I utilise within my own home lab. Please ref to http://docs.citrix.com/en-us/netscaler/11/license-upgrade-downgrade/upgrade-downgrade-the-system-software.html for an accurate and official upgrade process.

1: Download the firmware of your choice if more than one is available at – http://www.citrix.com/downloads/netscaler-adc.html. Please note that your will require either a valid Citrix account to download the firmware.
2: Upload the *.tgz file you downloaded to the following location on your NS V/A “/var/install“. Once you have confirmed its successfully uploaded disconnect and close your (s)FTP application. I use WinSCP myself which can be downloaded at – https://winscp.net/ as my (s)FTP client.
3: Open a Secure Shell (SSH) connection to the NS V/A and enter in the username and password access details where prompted. Once your have successfully logged in type “shell” then type “cd /var/nsinstall” to change to the nsinstall directory and then type “ls” to confirm the uploaded file is there.
4: Now to unpack the tarball package by typing in “tar –xvzf build_X_XX.tgz”, where build_X_XX.tgz (TIP: Enter in B and press TAB to complete typing the name of the file) is the name of the NS firmware build that we will be upgrading to. Once the tarball is successfully unpacked type in “ls” verifying that you can see the extracted files from the tarball.
5: Now type in “./installns” to begin the upgrade process and where prompted type in “Y” to reboot the NS V/A
6: Move to your hypervisors mgmt. console and watch the NS CLI reboot and once you can see the NS login prompt within the CLI navigate to the NS mgmt. IP addr and login using your NS access details and verify that the NS V/A has been successfully upgrade to your firmware of choice by looking at the firmware version in the top right-hand corner of the WebUI.