Sumanth Lingappa

NetScaler is an advanced application delivery, load balancing and security solution for your web apps. Terraform provides infrastructure-as-code and declarative approach to managing your NetScaler infrastructure. In this hands-on lab, we will learn how to use Terraform to configure load balancing service in NetScaler and expose your public web-apps over internet. The lab will provision the NetScaler, pair of web-servers, and automation controller and then guide you on using Terraform. Click the Start hands-on Lab at the top of the post to try out ! Let us know your feedback or any issues in the comments section.

NetScaler SDX is a hardware-based Application Delivery Appliance for enterprise and cloud datacenters. It supports hosting multiple NetScaler instances on a single hardware and can thus be used for Multi-tenancy. More on NetScaler SDX HERE In this article, I will explain how using terraform, you can configure SDX to - provision VPX on SDXstart/reboot/force-reboot VPXIntro to TerraformTerraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool that enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. More on terraform HERE NOTE: If you are new to Terraform, I highly recommend to visit our Get Started with ADC Automation using Terraform in Citrix Developer ForumAlso I will highly recommend to try our our LAB that takes you through the ADC Automation journey with Terraform.Pre-requisites to Terraform Automation for SDXTerraformSDX to be present1 available IP to be present to provision VPXStepsI highly recommend you to watch the below demo videos first.You can find all the video demos in this pageDemo Video: Provision a VPX on SDX with Terraform Demo Video: Stop, Start, Reboot, Forcestop, Forcereboot VPX Provision VPX on SDXFor this article, let us get ready with two files provider.tf contains citrixsdx terraform provider informationresource.tf contains the actual citrixsdx terraform resources which help provisioning a new VPX NOTE:Terraform does not mandate to have two separate files. We can have all the configuration in one .tf file. However, for logical separation, it is recommended to have two files — one for provider configuration and the other for resource configuration Defining SDX details in provider.tf # provider.tf -- full contentsterraform { required_providers { citrixsdx = { source = "citrix/citrixsdx" } }}provider "citrixsdx" { host = "https://10.10.10.10" # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_HOST env var username = "nsroot" # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_USERNAME env var password = "secretpassword" # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_PASSWORD env var ssl_verify = false # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_SSL_VERIFY env var} # provider.tfterraform { required_providers { citrixsdx = { source = "citrix/citrixsdx" } }} The first terraform {...} block tells the terraform software to download citrixsdx terraform plugin from the citrix namespace. Terraform software by default searches in it’s registry. Since our citrixsdx provider is not yet part of the terraform registry, we need to download the plugin manually. The process to download the plugin to our local computer can be found here.Once installed validate your installation. The process to validate can be found here # provider.tf provider "citrixsdx" { host = "https://10.10.10.10" # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_HOST env var username = "nsroot" # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_USERNAME env var password = "secretpassword" # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_PASSWORD env var ssl_verify = false # Optionally use CITRIXSDX_SSL_VERIFY env var} [/code]The second provider "citrixsdx" {...} block contains the initialisation of the citrixsdx provider. We need to provide citrixsdx host, username, password and an optional ssl_verify flag. Initialising provider.tf using environment variablesIf we do not intend to give all these information in plain text form, we can define respective environment variables as below. In that case the provider block will be provider "citrixsdx" {} Copy-paste the below commands to define the environment variables as per your working shell. If you are using bash or zsh shell export CITRIXSDX_HOST="YOUR SDX HOSTNAME OR IP ADDRESS"export CITRIXSDX_USERNAME="SDX USERNAME"export CITRIXSDX_PASSWORD="SDX PASSWORD"export CITRIXSDX_SSL_VERIFY=true/false # Whether to verify the untrusted certificate on the Citrix SDX when the Citrix SDX host is https [/code] If you are a windows user, and using powershell $env:CITRIXSDX_HOST = "YOUR SDX HOSTNAME OR IP ADDRESS"$env:CITRIXSDX_USERNAME = "SDX USERNAME"$env:CITRIXSDX_PASSWORD = "SDX PASSWORD"$env:CITRIXSDX_SSL_VERIFY = true/false # Whether to verify the untrusted certificate on the Citrix SDX when the Citrix SDX host is https [/code] Defining SDX configuration in resource.tfcitrixsdx_provision_vpx is the terraform resource which helps in configuring SDX to provision VPX. Above below terraform script shows how to use the citrixsdx_provison_vpx to provision a VPX on SDX. The below example script is to provision a VPX with the below details. You can change them as per your need. You can find more detailed documentation HERE Static IP as 10.222.74.177VPX name to be visible in SDX as device12 Gb of RAM —> tm_memory_total = 20482 Network interfacesNOTE: You can find Citrix SDX NITRO API documentation HERE# resource.tfresource "citrixsdx_provision_vpx" "device1" { name = "device1" ip_address = "10.222.74.177" if_internal_ip_enabled = false config_type = 0 ipv4_address = "10.222.74.177" netmask = "255.255.255.0" gateway = "10.222.74.129" nexthop = "" image_name = "NSVPX-XEN-13.1-17.42_nc_64.xva" profile_name = "nsroot_Notnsroot250" description = "from tf" throughput_allocation_mode = "0" throughput = "1000" max_burst_throughput = "0" burst_priority = "0" license = "Standard" number_of_acu = 0 number_of_scu = "0" vm_memory_total = "2048" pps = "1000000" number_of_cores = "0" l2_enabled = "false" if_0_1 = true vlan_id_0_1 = "" if_0_2 = true vlan_id_0_2 = "" network_interfaces { port_name = "LA/1" mac_address = "" mac_mode = "default" receiveuntagged = "true" } network_interfaces { port_name = "LA/2" mac_address = "" mac_mode = "default" receiveuntagged = "true" } nsvlan_id = "" vlan_type = 1 nsvlan_tagged = "false" nsvlan_interfaces = []} Steps to run terraformChange the directory containing resource.tf and provider.tfterraform init This will initialise/download the required plugins. Please refer to above section to download and validate citrixsdx-terraform-provider terraform plan This will layout the plan of action which terraform wants to configure. terraform apply when given yes this will push the configuration to SDX (in this case, initiates the VPX provisioning) terraform destroy — optional Optionally, if you want to destroy/delete the provisioned VPX, you can do so by this command. Use destroy command carefully, this will destroy all the resources present in all the .tf in the current folder. NOTE: The second part of the particle will be published soon. Second part will contain how to `start`, `stop`, `reboot` VPXs managed by SDX with Terraform. I hope this article helped you to provision VPX on SDX with Terraform. I am happy to answer any of your questions. Please let me know your views in the comment section. Thank you