Posted on Thursday, 5th November 2009 by Heiko
A quick guide how to install a Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) on VMware Workstation. This post will be full of clickable screenshots to make everything as clear as possible.
Prerequisites:
- VMware Workstation (30-day trial at the VMware site)
- Citrix Access Gateway iso (from My Citrix)
- VMware Serial Line Gateway (from L4Ka)
- PuTTY Tray (from http://haanstra.eu/putty)
- Knowledge on how to use VMware Workstation
What to do?
First of all fire up your VMware Workstation. Make a new Virtual Machine by choosing File, New, Virtual Machine. Choose to make a custom Virtual Machine and press next. Mount the CAG iso and press next. I promised a quick guide, so let me sum up the following settings:
- Guest OS settings: Linux with Other Linux 2.6.x kernel settings
- Processor configuration: 1 processor & 1 core/processor
- Memory for the VM: 256 RAM
- Network type: Use host-only networking
- I/O adaper type: LSI Logic
- Virtual SCSI disk with a size of 5 GB stored as a single file
Pay attention! After you adjust the settings of the CAG VM, it’s time to customize even more settings, so don’t click Finish. Click the Customize Hardware button and adjust the Virtual Machine configuration:
- remove the floppy drive
- remove the USB controller
- remove the sound card
- add a second network adapter (host-only)
- add a serial port (output to named pipe, named “\\.\pipe\vmwaredebug” without the quotes and with this end is the client & the other end is an application)
The settings tab of the Virtual Machine should look like:
Our Virtual Machine is configured and almost ready to be booted. Beware: almost ready, so don’t boot the VM yet! First we have to setup some kind of serial port gateway using VMwareGateway. Download VMwareGateway from the website, and place it in C:\Program Files\VMware\ (Since I am on a 64-bit OS, I placed it in Program Files (x86)). I needed Administrator-rights to accomplish this step, so I opened up a elevated Windows Explorer using CTRL+Shift+left click on the Windows Explorer icon.
After this is done, open up a command prompt and navigate to VMwareGateway.exe. Start the program with the “/t” switch, to start it in test mode (Left picture). This program will make it possible to communicate to the CAG using the serial port we added earlier, by using some kind of terminal program (PuTTY Tray in our case). After starting the program it is possible Windows Firewall will pop-up and ask to grant access. Allow it, and move on!
After we started the VMwareGateway and left it running in the background, it is time to setup PuTTY Tray so we can connect to the CAG. Download PuTTY Tray, open it and enter the following details:
After those details are entered, also adjust the following Line discipline options:
- Local echo: Force off
- Local line editing: Force off
These settings are necessary, because else everything you enter in the terminal will be repeated and will make it impossible to login to the CAG:
Don’t forget to give this connection profile a name (CAG perhaps? 
) and save the adjusted settings. After those settings are saved, you can connect to the VMwareGateway by clicking Open. You will see an incoming telnet request accepted message in the VMwareGateway window which was waiting for someone to connect. Once this is done, you are kind of connected to the CAG by a serial port. Leave it open/connected.
Now it’s time to start up the Virtual Machine!
VMware Workstation will show us something like the picture on the right. While the VM is booting, a lot of windows will start showing information. VMware Workstation will show a CAG booting (looks like linux server booting). The VMwareGateway window will show us the pipe is connected:
As you can see on the picture on the left the VM is now connected to the VMwareGateway.
After just waiting some minutes more, the PuTTY Tray windows starts showing interesting stuff. The CAG is installing and preparing for first boot etc.:
As you can see in the screenshot on the right, it’s time to remove the mounted CAG iso and to reboot the appliance. Disconnect the CAG iso by adjusting the Virtual Machine settings in VMware Workstation
(screenshot on the left). After editing the settings and pushing the OK button, it is time to reboot the Virtual Machine. Leave all the windows (VMwareGateway window and PuTTY Tray window) open and let the info (and reboots) 
come to you! In the end the most interesting info will be shown in the PuTTY Tray window, the login prompt (screenshot on the right).
This is the magical moment, time to login with the default username and password:
- username: root
- password: rootadmin
After you logged in, you see a menu with several options. The first option is the express setup of the CAG, where you can specify the ip-address, gateway and the netmask that will be used. After configuring, you should be possible to ping the CAG on the ip you specified (if you configured correctly). Since I used a host-only network adapter connection, I used 
an ip-address of the 192.168.217.x range that already was configured in VMware Workstation.
When you’re able to ping the CAG, you should be able to browse to the webinterface on port 9001. In my (work)situation I had to disable the proxy before I could reach the website. After disabling it, I got another error, but it was a known error: the SSL-certificate was expired:
After ignoring the error, understanding the risks and adding the site to the trusted sites list, I was able to login to the CAG web interface with all of its glory!
Good luck on configuring the (virtual) CAG!
Related posts:
- Building a perfect Windows XP virtual machine template (VMware Workstation 6.5)
- VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) for VMware vCenter Server
- Free shared NAS/SAN storage using Openfiler 2.3 NFS on VMware ESX 4.0
Posted in Tech | Comments (5)
(4) 
(3) 
(0)
December 1st, 2009 at 11:03 Lethe(Quote)
Wow thanks a lot this is exactly what I was looking for written in an easy to follow and clear way
I’m preparing for my CCEA certification and don’t have the time to follow all Citrix official courses and trying to do the most study on a self paced way.
Thanks, Lethe.
February 25th, 2010 at 12:45 AJ(Quote)
Very nice blog. Only you can’t download the iso file anymore at mycitrix.com. I there an other location where I can download this ISO file?
April 13th, 2010 at 11:48 Ken(Quote)
Odd question perhaps, but how do you login on the CAG?
After typig login: root [enter] it says authentication Failed. It don’t let me type the password.
May 7th, 2010 at
[...] 3ème étapeAutres liens >> Autres liens Vous trouverez un très bon tutorial ici pour l’installation d’une Access Gateway sous VMware [...]
July 1st, 2010 at 16:07 Lucian(Quote)
Ken: verify if you’ve configured PuTTy as mentioned above – especially see if
Local line editing: Force off