Musings of a sysadmin
Posts tagged Citrix
Renew your Citrix fundamentals 6 licence
0So you’ve managed to install citrix fundamentals 6 and keep running with it for a year, now you get those lovely emails saying that you have to renew your licences for it.
Once you have logged into your mycitrix account and reallocated your new licence and downloaded the .lic file what do you do next.
1/ Log into your citrix fundamentals server and open the Citrix quick start applet.
2/ Click on the licencing menu item on the left hand side then hit the blue hyperlink that says “Add Citrix licences”.
3/ Point the dialogue box at your downloaded licence file and allow xenapp to install the file.
4/ At this point you will notice that the licences are cumulative *i.e. if you have 30 licences last year and have just installed the renewal licence for another 30 then 60 licences will be reported within the console with the approaching renewal date displayed rather than the renewal date (next years date).
5/ At this point you will need to open the services.msc console (start\administrative tools\services) and stop the “Citrix Licencing” service.
6/ Once stopped (assuming you are using server 2008 R2) Navigate to c:\program files (x86)\citrix\licencing\my files\ and MOVE the old licence file out of the directory. Its important that you leave all the other files within the directory such as the citrix.opt and the citrix_startup.lic. If you are unsure of which licence file to move you can look at the licence file with notepad and within the top line is the expiry date of the licence file (in US format).
7/ Once the old licence file has been moved out of the licence directory, you can start the “Citrix Licencing” service within windows and check to make sure it displays the correct number of licences and days remaining. If you still had the citrix quick start applet open you will need to close and reopen it as more than likely the licence page won’t work until you do so.
Disabling Citrix Universal Print Driver in Xenapp 6 Fundamentals
0311 days
I needed to disable CUP in our environment because we use Terminal Servers for most user desktops and it was not really viable to install all the normal software the users use onto the xenapp server. Also if you publish Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) as an application through xenapp you will more than likely find that remote printing fails to work as the TS server has no knowledge of the CUP driver and there is no way of installing it onto any server other than the xenapp server/s you have on your site.
In order to disable universal printing logon to your xenapp server and run gpedit.msc. You will now notice that there are citrix policy nodes under computer and user configuration policies.
Click on the Citrix Policies under User Configuration and click on the Settings Tab. Scroll down top Printing\Universal Printing and click Add on the Universal Printing Setting. Then edit the setting to say “use only printer model specific drivers”.
Reboot the server and you should now notice that it no longer uses CUP, although you now have the fun and games of loading printer drivers and testing them, but it is a way round printing through an MSTSC published application.
Manually Setting Xenapp Data Collector Preference
1936 days
by admin
in Uncategorized
As previously discussed the Data Collector stores and distributes information (such as published applications, connected users,licensing etc) on zones within a farm. Also each server has a data collector service but only one server is elected the Data Collector (which minimises wan traffic and stops issues from occurring if all the servers data collectors are chatting away to each other.
The data collection election is entirely automatic and normally the first server installed into a farms zone will be given the MOST PREFERRED setting however you can change this setting if you wish.
In order to change the preference you will need to open the presentation server console and right click and choose properties on the farm name at the top of the tree menu.
The next window you see will by default tell you that the feature is now administered in the access management console. However ignore this and click on the Zones option and expand the zone you would like to edit.
You will see the list of servers in the zone and one will have a blue tick next to it, this by default is the MOST PREFERRED. For the servers you would like to change preferences on you will need to click on each one individually and click the set election preference button to set the preference you desire.
One thing to note is that only one server must have the MOST PREFERRED option set all others are set by default to DEFAULT PREFERENCE.
Xenapp 5 Data Collectors
0Configuring the Data Collector Service
The data collector service is the hub of a citrix farm, the data collector responsibilities include but are not limited to:-
Information on published applications
Connected Users
Sessions
Licencing
Server Load
Distribution of the above Information to other data collectors in the farm.
Data collectors operate within “ZONES” inside a farm. Zones are groups of servers that are usually grouped by geographical boundaries. Zones are created to minimise WAN traffic. If for example we had offices in Iceland and one in australia, each would have a seperate zone so that users in iceland connect and lanuch published applications from the iceland zone. This would stop them connecting to the australia zone and incuring WAN costs.
In the above configuration you would still get WAN traffic however it would be minimal as only the datacollectors would be relaying information on their status to each other.
Another interesting thing about data collectors is the “election” process. This is the automated process where a data collector is elected as the primary collector and others as backups. This process is completely automated and can be explained in the following.
You have 2 zones (Iceland and Australia) each has 5 servers within their own zone (so the farm has 10 servers in total) . If all servers allowed their data collectors to chat across the WAN it would increase the amount of WAN traffic and potentially cause confusion. So within each zone the election process takes place. This allows one server to communicate the zones status/info etc to the other zome. However also elected are backup data collectors. This will then become the primary data collector should anything happen to the original primary data collector.
Although this is completely automated there are configuration settings you can change to assist the choice of the primary data collector.
MOST PREFFERED
The first choice for the data collector only assign this to ONE server in each zone. For information this is normally automatically assigned to the first xenapp server installed in a zone.
PREFERRED
The second choice for a data collector, more than one PREFFERED data collector can exist.
DEFAULT PREFERENCE
Default settings for servers, if no settings have been manually chosen for the servers then they go into this level of preference. Also in the event of a MP server failure and no manual preference settings have been configured then elections will occur at this level (simply because the PREFERRED option for a server must be manually chosen.
NOT PREFFERED
This is the runt setting for the servers. Servers in this level will only become data collectors if no others are available.
If you leave all the preference settings alone and let the farm get on with it by itself then when we installed the servers in the iceland zone the first server to come online will automatically be designated the MOST PREFFERED server, the other 4 will get the DEFAULT PREFERENCE.
Recent Comments