[THIN] Re: License server across WAN Link

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
 

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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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