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.

Citrix ADC deployment types supported by Citrix ADM

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.

The result of built-in pre-upgrade checks

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.

Citrix ADM service supports pre- and post-upgrade custom scripts

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.

Schedule a two-stage upgrade with Citrix ADM service

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.

Backup your ADC, clean the software image after a successful upgrade, upload upgrade image immediately to the ADC, and receive an execution report via email

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.