Automate Management of NetScaler with Puppet Labs

These days, operations teams are expected to manage increasingly complex infrastructure while meeting business expectations for application delivery.

DevOps practices can be used to enable operations teams to scale servers and applications rapidly and efficiently without time consuming manual configuration. Extending DevOps functionality to the Application Delivery Controller is critical and needs to be a part of any full-featured DevOps software package.



The world is increasingly moving to a model where infrastructure is managed, deployed and scaled as code. NetScaler has been designed to ensure the best APIs and interfaces, fully accessible to the best modern infrastructure management tools out there.

Puppet Labs has been at the forefront of this movement, and we are seeing an increase in our customers that want to integrate and deploy NetScaler as part of their DevOps processes.

The Puppet Enterprise Module for NetScaler

The Citrix NetScaler team and the Puppet Labs module team are happy to announce the availability of the Puppet Enterprise-supported Citrix NetScaler module. This module lets you manage NetScaler physical and virtual appliances. Puppet unifies tooling and processes that used to be siloed, giving you all the benefits of managing your infrastructure as code. With its declarative, model-based approach to IT automation, the Puppet Enterprise solution enables you to perform functions as diverse as automating simple, repetitive tasks to deploying large-scale public, private, and hybrid clouds.



This functionality let’s operations teams deploy, automate, and manage the configuration of an entire application infrastructure “stack” including compute, network and storage. This gives application developers the ability to elastically expand and contract infrastructure resources, automate application tests, and reduce application development time frames.

A Practical Path to Automating Application Delivery Networks

The ongoing virtualization of data center infrastructure and integration of cloud computing resources makes it possible to be able to dynamically shift and monitor workloads across those environments.

As data center networks have grown to encompass thousands of devices, existing network architectures have proven inadequate for rapid deployment of applications and unable to keep up with the agility requirements of today’s business environment.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been promoted as the solution for dynamically provisioning and automatically configuring network resources as applications are deployed. Recently SDN has moved beyond theory to practical reality, as open standards and growing interoperability among vendors are driving rollouts of new capabilities.



Evolving to an Application Centric Infrastructure

With ACI Cisco envisions a distributed, policy driven approach to SDN that relies on the concept of declarative control. “Declarative control dictates that each object is asked to achieve a desired state and makes a promise to reach this state, without being told precisely how to do so,” according to Cisco. As a result, “underlying objects handle their own configuration state changes and are responsible only for passing exceptions or faults back to the control system. This approach reduces the burden and complexity of the control system and allows greater scale.”