Auto-provisioning NetScaler Virtual Appliance on Hyper-V

Did you know that Citrix just included support for Auto-provsioning of NetScaler on Hyper-V ? Well me neither until I scrolled trough the entire release notes on the Citrix website when they released the latest build. The auto-provisioning feature allows us to preconfigure the initial IP setup on the NetScaler.

So instead of going into the CLI and configuring the NSIP, Subnet and Gateway we can have a preconfigured file which sets this for us when booting and when that is done we can continue on with the rest of the configuration using NITRO APIs.

NOTE: This is still only supported for Hyper-V as far as I am aware of, after speaking with Citrix. So I’m guessing that XenServer and VMware ESX is coming eventually.

The setup to do this is simple:

1: Create a file called userdata.xml (Which contains this information, we can alter the different values here)

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ standalone=”no”<Environment xmlns:oe=”http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/environment/1″
xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
oe:id=””
xmlns=”http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/environment/1″>
<PlatformSection>
<Kind>HYPER-V</Kind>
<Version>2013.1</Version>
<Vendor>CISCO</Vendor>
<Locale>en</Locale>
</PlatformSection>
<PropertySection>
<Property oe:key=”com.citrix.netscaler.ovf.version” oe:value=”1.0″/>
<Property oe:key=”com.citrix.netscaler.platform” oe:value=”NS1000V”/>
<Property oe:key=”com.citrix.netscaler.orch_env” oe:value=”cisco-orch-env”/>
<Property oe:key=”com.citrix.netscaler.mgmt.ip” oe:value=”10.102.100.122″/>
<Property oe:key=”com.citrix.netscaler.mgmt.netmask” oe:value=”255.255.255.128″/>
<Property oe:key=”com.citrix.netscaler.mgmt.gateway” oe:value=”10.102.100.67″/></PropertySection>
</Environment>

2: Create this file on a ISO using for instance free tools like ImgBurn, then mount the ISO file under the IDE controller for the NetScaler VPX

image

And we are good to go!

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