Licensing

When we want to set up or deploy NetScaler, we need a license in place in order to access the features we want to use. An important point to note here is that three types of licenses are available for NetScaler:

If you want to download a platform license for NetScaler from https://www.citrix.com/, you need to enter the MAC address of the first NIC on your appliance in the Host ID field on the website.

The MAC address can be found either via the CLI of the appliance or by using a hypervisor. We will look at CLI in detail in this chapter. To get hardware information from the CLI of the appliance, we have to first log in to the NetScaler System CLI, and then switch to the FreeBSD shell by typing shell and running the following command:

lmutil lmhostid

When using a hypervisor, such as the virtual machine manager PowerShell, run the following command:

Get-VM | Where { $_Name -match "VM" } | Get-SCNetworkAdapter | Select MACAddress

If you are using VMware and have PowerCLI available, you can use a similar command as follows to get the same result:

Get-NetworkAdapter -VM NameofVM

This will give you the host ID/MAC address of the appliance, which needs to be entered on https://www.citrix.com/ to generate a platform license. We will cover installing the license a little later.