Upgrading Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise Edition from 8.1 to 9.3 (HA Pair)

Upgrading a Highly Available Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise Edition (AGEE) pair can be an intimidating task. Quite often you won’t have a test environment to work in, as the appliances can be pricey. And even more often, the ones you’re upgrading are heavily used and important to the business. While this can be cause for concern, the upgrade process is, in fact, relatively simple, safe, and fast.

These steps assume the following:

• You have 2 AGEE Appliances in an HA Pair (active/passive)
• These appliances are running NS 8.1
• You have “nsroot” credentials and access to the appliances via SSH

What these steps don’t cover:

• Troubleshooting changes in software features or capabilities as a result of upgrading from NS 8.1 to NS 9.3

Let’s get started!

Disclaimer: These steps are to serve as an educational guide. I am not responsible for damages or outages incurred as part of following these steps. Perform these steps in a test environment if possible before beginning.

1. Backup the NetScaler Configuration using WinSCP (ns.conf)
2. Visit My Citrix and download NS 9.3. This requires an active login.
3. Once downloaded, use WinSCP to connect to both of your AGEE appliances.
4. Place the .tar file in /var/nsinstall/9.3/ (You may have to create the folder)
5. Starting with the passive node, in this case we’ll refer to it as AGEE02, extract the .tar file. To do this, navigate to /var/nsinstall/9.3/ and then run “tar -zxvf filename.tar”
6. To begin the upgrade, run the command “./installns”
7. You may allow the software to archive older versions of software to free up space if you need it.
8. Once the upgrade is complete, you may reboot AGEE02.
9. Once AGEE02 is back up and running on NS 9.3, you can now perform a manual failover to test the new version.
10. To perform a manual failover from AGEE01 to AGEE02, connect to AGEE01 via SSH and reboot the appliance (type “reboot”).
11. The failover will result in the NS 9.3 appliance (AGEE02) being the active note. You may now test functionality before upgrading AGEE01.
12. If there is an issue with NS 9.3, you can fail back over to the NS 8.1 appliance (AGEE01) by rebooting AGEE02.
13. If all is well, continue with upgrading AGEE01 (which is now the secondary appliance).
14. On AGEE01, using SSH, navigate to /var/nsinstall/9.3/ and run “tar -zxvf filename.tar”
15. To begin the upgrade, run the command “./installns”
16. You may allow the software to archive older versions of software to free up space if you need it.
17. Once the upgrade is complete, you may reboot AGEE01.
18. Now that both appliances are updated, you can leave AGEE02 as the active node, or you can reboot it to failover to AGEE01.

Voila! Your AGEE Appliances are running NS 9.3 now! This should apply to most versions of the NetScaler/AGEE software, but these steps most definitely work for NS 8.1 to NS 9.3. Rather than using the CLI to perform the upgrade, you can use the Web GUI. If you do this, start with the passive node as we did here.