Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) service is a SaaS solution available on Citrix Cloud that helps you manage, monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot your global hybrid multi-cloud application delivery infrastructure from a single touch point. It helps with faster time to value and enables operational efficiency.
A Citrix ADC upgrade is an important task for any Citrix ADC network administrator. In most organizations with many Citrix ADCs, these upgrades typically require a dedicated admin to carry them out during a planned maintenance period, and admins are always looking for new ways to simplify and automate this process.
The Maintenance Job functionality in Citrix ADM service simplifies Citrix ADC upgrades. In this blog post, we’ll look at 10 ways Citrix ADM service’s capabilities support easier ADC upgrades with its Maintenance Job functionality.
Supports all Citrix ADC deployment types
A customer’s environment might have a variety of Citrix ADC types — standalone, HA, cluster. Citrix ADM service supports the upgrade of all these deployment types.
Parallelized for a fleet of Citrix ADCs
Customers can have many Citrix ADCs in their environment. With Citrix ADM service, ADC upgrades happen in parallel across the entire ADC fleet.
Built-in pre-upgrade checks
Citrix ADM service runs built-in pre-upgrade checks before the upgrade of each ADC node and warns the IT admin of imminent upgrade failure reasons. It checks for the adequacy of disk space and disk hardware errors, both of which can lead to upgrade failures. It also checks for any user customizations that might be lost after the upgrade process. If any of these checks fail, the admin gets notifications on the ADM UI with the details and can remove from the upgrade process the ADC instances that failed the checks or can resolve the issue(s) and proceed.
Custom scripts to perform additional pre- and post-upgrade checks
IT admins want to understand how their Citrix ADC upgrade affected their ADC configurations/environment. To do this, they must execute scripts before and after each node’s upgrade. Citrix ADM service gives admins the ability to include their custom pre- and post-upgrade validation scripts. The output of these scripts is emailed to the configured email distribution list.
Upgrade now or schedule for later
Customers can choose to run the upgrade maintenance job themselves, run the job immediately after creating it, or schedule it for later. IT admins can use the schedule option to automate the upgrade during the planned maintenance window.
Customized control levels for ADC HA two-stage upgrades
With Citrix ADC HA upgrades, an IT admin might prefer to have a controlled upgrade with a planned interval between the upgrade of the two nodes. This can help to ensure that the first node has been upgraded successfully and without any issues. Citrix ADM service provides this functionality with two-stage upgrades.
Dissociate image upload time from actual upgrade activity time
If the upgrade task is scheduled, the IT admin can choose to upload the upgrade image when they create the upgrade maintenance task or at the scheduled time for upgrade. This helps separate the image upload task from the actual upgrade task so time is not consumed by the image uploading during the actual upgrade.
Auto-delete the upgrade software image from the Citrix ADC
The upgraded software image consumes space on a Citrix ADC. Citrix ADM service provide an option to auto-delete this image from the ADC after a successful upgrade.
Back up the Citrix ADC before starting upgrade
Taking a backup of your Citrix ADCs before starting your upgrade will come in handy if something goes wrong during the process. Citrix ADM service enables IT admins to automate backups as part of the upgrade flow.
Get a detailed execution report after the upgrade
The Citrix ADM service maintains a detailed execution report after the upgrade task is complete. It tells the admin if the upgrade was successful and provides visibility into each stage of the upgrade process, showing at each step in the process whether a pass (or fail) happened. The execution report can also be sent as an email attachment to the configured email distribution list or to Slack.
Citrix ADM service enables a seamless, automated way to upgrade your Citrix ADC fleet. For more information on the Maintenance Job functionality, check out our Citrix ADM service documentation. It’s also easy to onboard and use. Check out the video below to help you get onboarded with Citrix ADM service and review our documentation.
