Netscaler command center 5.2 beta

I was just acccepted into the Netscaler command beta and already took it for a test drive. So for those who are not familier with Commad Center it is a product from Citrix which allows for easy management / monitoring of Netscaler products (including Netscaler VPX/MPX/SDX and Netscaler gateway and cloudbridge products.

The product is not like Insight or Netscaler which runs as an virtual appliance, this is a java based software which needs to run on top of Windows Server (It does not support yet) and it stores data in a mySQL database.

Now im not going to show the setup, but how the admin console looks like (Since the setup is really straight forward)
The admin GUI is available using https://ip:8443 (using the default ports) and username root and password public

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After login I am shown an overview pane which shows the status of the devices which I have added to the Command Center

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Now before I show how to add a device, there is some cool stuff here which is quite useful and that is configuration part here!

Now i can schedule a software update to automatically stop a ha node and change node and do update, reboot and then change the node. I can do certificate management and have a central repostiory I can also do deployment automation

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Now adding a device here is quite simple, choose Citrix Network –> Add Device. Firstly you need to create a device profile which contains user credentials and SNMP info

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And for what product you are going to use these credentials against. It will then do a discovery using NITRO API and SNMP against the device/s. After that I can see that the device is showing as operational. If I click on the name here it will automatically connect to the device using the management IP.

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So if I now do a change on a device which is added to the Command Center it will show SNMP traps for every change that I do.

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Now if I go into the monitoring pane, it will list out all services which are setup on a device. Both regular load balanced services and Netscaler gateways. image

I can also setup integration with an SMTP server to allow command center to send out alerts on email if a critical event has happend.

So if you have more then two Netscaler nodes I suggest implementing Command Center since it allows for ease of management and reporting. One issue I still have with it is that it does not support Windows Server 2012 but this is still beta 2 and im guessing it will show up later on.

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