[THIN] Re: License server across WAN Link

  • From: "Steve Greenberg" <steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 10:22:24 -0700

Angela, 

 

You will not lose current license functionality when you return licenses and
re-allocate at mycitrix.com, the license file you have loaded into your
current license server will continue to work.

 

Any server can point to any license server, or, you can make it the farm
wide setting so you can mix and match as you need

 

When connection to a license server is lost the current sessions are okay
and the timeout/grace period comes in to effect at that point, new sessions
are allowed during this period ( I think it is 96 hours now, don't remember
for sure). However I think there is an issue when you reboot a server
because it will not get's it startup license- can anyone else verify this?

 

 

Steve Greenberg

Thin Client Computing

34522 N. Scottsdale Rd D8453

Scottsdale, AZ 85266

(602) 432-8649

www.thinclient.net

steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

  _____  

From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Angela Smith
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 5:20 AM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: License server across WAN Link

 

Hi Jeremy

Thanks for your reply.  The WAN link is 30Mb so Im hoping the Citrix Servers
will have a reliable connection to the License Server at all times.  I will
give it a go.  I read a few Citrix documents but I have a few questions.

1) I need to get my licenses re-issued as the server name in the UK is
different to the existing License Server.  If I return existing licenses
will my Production farm stop working?  There may be a gap of a few days
before the new license file is added to the new Licensing Server.  I want to
ensure existing Citrix Production users are not impacted when the licenses
are returned.

2) Are there any issues with setting 1 Citrix Server to use the new
Licensing Server in the UK whilst the other Citrix servers point to local
License Server?  Id like to do this for testing purposes to ensure the
Citrix Servers are working off the remote UK License Server before moving
the entire farm to the remote License Server.

3) If the Citrix Server looses connectivity to the License Server, will the
existing Citrix User sessions be dropped or would they be given a grace
license automatically until the connectivity to the Citrix License Server is
restored?  Is this seamless to the user?

Thanks
Ang
 

  _____  

Subject: [THIN] Re: License server across WAN Link
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 19:34:46 +1100
From: Jeremy.Saunders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi Ang,

 

The short answer is that this will most probably cause problems and is a bad
design. There are some awesome whitepapers from Citrix on how the licensing
service works. But basically this is what I typically write in my design
documents (taken straight from the whitepapers).

 

"At startup, a XenApp server talks to the License Server and gets a startup
license. This action will consume 9.87Kb of bandwidth. If the License Server
is not available, the server goes into the grace period and the IMA
(Independent Management Architecture) Service reports an error to the Event
Log. The process of getting a startup licenses also occurs if the IMA
Service is restarted at any point.

 

Every 2 to 5 minutes the XenApp will exchange a heartbeat with the license
server to determine if the license server is still available. The amount of
bandwidth in this transaction is 462 bytes for each server. The heartbeats
are randomised between 2 to 5 minutes from when the server checks out a
start-up license.

 

Every 24 hours the XenApp server will request a refresh of the license
server data, this is to check if license allocation has been increased or
decreased. The amount of bandwidth in this transaction is 9.87Kb for each
server.

 

When a user logs on, the XenApp server tries for 5 seconds to request a
license; if this process fails the user gets a grace period license (30
days)."

 

So you can see that communication to the licensing server is important,
otherwise your servers may continually (or randomly) dish out grace period
licenses, which also causes delays in the logon time.

 

At the end of the day you can only try it and see. You can set the UK
license server at the server level in the Access Management Console on one
of your servers and see how this behaves.

 

Cheers,

Jeremy.

 

 

From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Angela Smith
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 3:10 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] License server across WAN Link

 

Hi

Our organisation is looking at utilising a "centralized" Citrix Licensing
server in another country (UK) across a decent sized WAN Link.  We currently
have a local Citrix Licensing Server.  Will there be any performance issues
with accessing the new license server across the WAN?  Should the license
server be on the same LAN as the Citrix Servers?  Are there any gotchas in
changing licensing servers?

Setup is Windows 2003 with Presentation Server 4

Thanks
Ang 

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