Hi Ang,
I just want to add, that even though I said it may be a bad design, just like Greg, I have actually successfully done this before.
My customer was using it as a strategic deployment, and only has 85 concurrent licenses. The license server is based here in Perth (Australia), but PS4.0 servers are deployed to UK, South Africa and South America. Their WAN links across the oceans are not huge and have latency to deal with too.
Sometimes you need to look at the solution for what it is, and design it for that. The extra time during login was no big deal, and they don’t seem to have any issues getting licenses. It’s been running like this for almost 18 months now without a hiccup.
So this is low usage and strategic. But if your solution has high concurrency, just be cautious.
By startup license, I think Steve was referring to the MPS-WSXICA_MPS-WSXICA.ini file…
“Information about Citrix XenApp licenses is “cached” locally on each XenApp in a file called “MPS-WSXICA_MPS-WSXICA.ini”, stored in the “%ProgramFiles%\Citrix” folder.
The MPS-WSXICA_MPS-WSXICA.ini file is a simple text file. It contains a snapshot of the number, types, and expiration dates of the various licenses maintained in the licensing database.
The MPS-WSXICA_MPS-WSXICA.ini file is created automatically on each XenApp server the first time a server contacts the Citrix License Server, and it’s updated whenever any licenses are changed in the licensing database.
A reboot of the XenApp server(s) will not affect the 30 day grace period, as long as the MPS-WSXICA_MPS-WSXICA.ini file is not deleted.”
Cheers,
Jeremy.
From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Angela Smith
Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 6:47 AM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Re: License server across WAN Link
Greg
What is your reasons for leaving MS TS license on local network? We may also centralise this server in the UK to reduce the amount of servers doing the same task. We have multiple Citrix farms around the world hence us looking at centralising the licensing.
Steve, Im very interested in your comment about the issue not getting a startup license if the Citrix license server is across a WAN. Our citrix servers reboot 2 times a week so I need to ensure this is going to work. Would appreciate comments on anyone doing this and whether this is an issue for them.
Thanks
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 08:04:16 -0600
Subject: [THIN] Re: License server across WAN Link
From: gareese@gmail.com
To: thin@freelists.org
for what it is worth Angela, I have run my citrix license server over WAN links (poor ones at that) in the past and we never had any problems. However, I did keep my Microsoft TS license servers on the local nets and off the wan.
Greg
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 6:19 AM, Angela Smith <angela_smith9@hotmail.com> wrote:
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@datacom.com.au
To: thin@freelists.org
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@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Angela Smith
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 3:10 PM
To: thin@freelists.org
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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