Thursday, January 6, 2011

Citrix XenApp 6 servers keep reverting to old license server name

When setting up our new Citrix XenApp 6 server for initial testing we installed the license server on itself (call it CITRIX1). As we were nearing the time to move it into production I wanted to move the license service to another non XenApp server (call it XENAPP-LS).  I did so and migrated our MetaFrame Presentation Server licenses to it.  I wasn't exactly sure how to tell the CITRIX1 XenApp server to point to the new XENAPP-LS license server so did some Google searches.  I figured out you have to create a XenApp Computer Policy and add the following setting "License Server Host Name" with the appropriate name of the new license server (i.e. XENAPP-LS.mydomain.local).  Did a reboot and bingo, good to go!  It starting use the new licenses.  I removed the license server off of CITRIX1.

Problem
Well, as I was installing things I needed to do a reboot.  On the next reboot it popped up a message saying "Citrix License Error : Citrix XenApp cannot contact the license server CITRIX1".  Say what?  I checked my XenApp computer policy and it still said the license server was XENAPP-LS.   Rebooted again and this time it did not complain and was working fine.  Fast forward a few days, now the server is in production.  After one of the 3am reboots we perform each night it reverted back to looking for CITRIX1 as the license server.  No one could log on that morning!!  Another reboot fixed it.

Apparently if the server can not communicate with the SQL XenApp datastore at a magical moment during boot up, it looks in the registry and does not apply the policy.  It seems like it would eventually re-check and then apply the policy but that apparently does not happen (since it was 4 hours since the 3am reboot before the first user tried to log on and would not let anyone on).

Solution
You need to edit the registry on your XenApp server(s) to manually change the license server name to what it needs to be.

Checkout:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\LSName 
and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Citrix\Licensing\MFCM_LSHostName

These still had the CITRIX1 value in there.  I changed it to XENAPP-LS.mydomin.local and have not since had the problem.

10 comments:

  1. Did this work for you? I did this fix and it worked for a while but then failed back.
    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  2. Same here. I cannot find any reference to my old server anywhere on the system. Sometimes it takes my new license server, sometimes my old one.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for this solution, it worked for us as well! But I did change 2 more keys in the registry, just in case, on top of the ones listed above and implementing the policy:

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Citrix\IMA\Licensing]
    "LicenseServerHostName"="CITRIX2"

    and

    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\Citrix]
    "LSName"="CITRIX3"

    Eric

    ReplyDelete
  4. I found that the registry would keep reverting back to the old licence name. I stopped all citrix services and made the cnage again, this worked for me. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I had the same issue but it was due to an old citrix gpo applied.
    if you have the same problem after reboot or IMA service restart and you have manually changed the registry key.Please have a look to your GPO.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Guys, it didn't worked. As soon IMA is started - It's picking old license server. Any help ?

    ReplyDelete
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Please let me know if this helped you out, or if you would like to submit other suggestions or correct something I may have mis-stated.

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Science Fiction Author / Vice President of Technology for The Christman Company