Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time working with Citrix Netscalers, check out www.citrix.com for more details (yes I know I’m lazy). A lot of this work I do via the command line, yes there is a nice GUI available but when I sat the Netscaler course the instructor told us that the command line was quicker so that’s what I use a lot of the time. It also allows for commands to be scripted and/or copied and pasted if you are making bulk changes.

Next month my current employer has its annual DR test, because the Netscalers here manage 99% of the e-commerce traffic (and we are e-commerce mad), there is a requirement to take along a Netscaler appliance. The problem with this is 2 fold, 1) I’m on holiday that week (wasn’t planned, promise) and 2) we don’t have any spare physical Netscalers to take.

The solution to these problems is to take a virtual Netscaler (or a VPX appliance) which will run on VMware. With a bit of IT Geek black magic I have ported the “live” configuration over to a VPX. The other part of the problem (i.e. me not being around) is for one of the other IT guys to take a stack of notes (once I’ve written them) on what needs tweaking to get it to work. This prompted me to develop a basic command cheat sheet to save me a bit of work so I thought I would share it HERE.

Bear in mind it’s just some of the more basic commands and the ones that I feel will be relevant to the DR test. Who knows you might find a use for it, if you have Netscalers where you work. You can download a whole host of PDF documents from Citrix including a document listing all the command line options, but that’s a lot of reading.. 🙂

Enjoy

The Geek