So ran into an interesting thing restoring a Citrix Netscaler Gateway ADC. I went through and was doing a re-deploy of an ADC VPX. So a couple things that I noticed that were rather odd…..

First thing that I noticed was this:

Backup / Import option

So what I noticed was when you select “Import” radio button, the button to accept it once you select the file, is the “Backup” button still. I would think this would be a fantastic change to make a button with the name “Import.” This is something minor, but it was something that stood out to me.

Next thing of interest when restoring your backup file…..

Restore option

Once you have “Backup / Imported” your file to the ADC, you can go back to the list of backup files available to you. Something of importance here. If you have the “Basic” backup, that is a very minimal backup including configuration files only. If you use the “Full” option, this includes the /nsconfig/, /var/, certificates, and License files. Rather important to make sure you are using the correct backup option here. And example here is re-deploying the VPX and wanting to replace the one you had.

Now when you select the “Restore” option, you get this screen:

Restore option

You then get an option to “Reboot.”

Reboot option

Once I did the “Warm reboot,” I was presented with a wait 60 seconds screen. When I logged back in, I noticed that there was basically nothing there. I worked on it for a few minutes and decided to shut it down and power it back up after looking for another backup file. Once it had powered down and powered back on, low and behold it happened to have everything! Success was had! Something to note that will be rather important, should you decide to re-deploy a VPX on ESXi, make sure to note the MAC address of the VM BEFORE you re-deploy. The license file is married to the MAC and that is EXTREMELY important. You can open the license file with Notepad or Notepad++ and read the MAC there and then manually set it on the VM options. Just something that I ran into and thought would be useful information to have!

Note: I had already applied the license file and found that I had to change the MAC address, so all of that was done before attempting to restore the configuration from backup.