FARM MANAGEMENT

Farm management is required to verify that the farm continues to meet the needs of the business environment. Servers should be monitored to verify that the load is appropriate. Too many users, runaway processes, memory leaks, and poor applications on a server can lead to poor performance.

The Management Console (MC) for Presentation Server is the central program used to monitor and manage Presentation Servers and server farms. The MC is a Java-based program that ships with Presentation Server. Each Citrix product (such as Installation Manager) adds software modules (Java applets) to the MC to provide controls and other features for those products.

The Management Console (MC) for Presentation Server

The MC allows the Presentation Server administrators to do the following:

• – Configure servers and farm settings from any connected workstation.

• – View information about current sessions, users, and processes.

• – Set up and manage printers for ICA client users.

• – Publish applications and monitor application usage.

• – Enter, activate, and assign Presentation Server licenses.

• – Monitor, reset, disconnect, and reconnect ICA client sessions.

• – Send messages to ICA client users and shadow their ICA sessions.

Each Presentation Server has the MC installed by default. However, the Presentation Server CD-ROM can be used to install the MC on other Windows workstations. This enables the designated operations staff to manage Presentation Server farms from non-Citrix computers. Only users in the Citrix Administrators group are authorized to use the MC.

The MC queries the Zone Data Collector (or a server you select) for information such as running processes, connected users, and server loads. Depending on the size of the server farm, the console might affect performance in the server farm. It is best to only open one copy of the MC at a time and connect to the Zone Data Collector (ZDC) so that the console can query data directly. Autorefresh of the MC should not be used in most situations due to the additional load it places on the ZDC server.

Controlling Access to the Management Console

The MC uses standard Windows logon and user account authentication to grant access to designated MetaFrame Administrators. Access to the MC must be granted through the MC interface by adding a user or group to the MetaFrame Administrators section. To add a new Administrator, the current MetaFrame administrator must have a privilege type of "Full Administration." To add a Citrix administrator, right-click the MetaFrame Administrators node in the console tree in the left-hand window pane and choose Add MetaFrame Administrator. In the dialog box that appears, select the user or group account that will be added and click Next . The Select Tasks dialog now appears.

Select the appropriate privilege type for the new administrator and click Next. The access granted to an administrator is fully customizable. There are options for View Only Full Administration, and Custom. Custom permissions can be used to create level one help desk personnel access, which only allows for administration of user sessions. All levels of the MC have their own access rights, so it is possible to create administrator logons for managers such that they have access only to the areas they need to perform their job, but little else beyond that.

Using Server and Application Folders Within MC

The MC provides the ability to group servers and applications into folders. There is no correlation between MC folders and Program Neighborhood folders displayed within application sets. The MC folders help to manage a large number of servers and increase the performance of the MC because the MC queries data only for the servers or applications in the current folder view. One way to increase the response time of the MC is to divide the list of servers into folders based on their zones.

Managing Zones

In a Presentation Server farm, a zone is a grouping of Presentation Server servers that share a common data collector, which is a Presentation Server server that receives information from all the servers in the zone. A zone in a Presentation Server farm elects a Zone Data Collector for the zone if a new server joins the zone, a member server restarts, or the current ZDC becomes unavailable. A ZDC becomes unavailable if the server goes down or is disconnected from the network, or if you move the server to another zone.

When a zone elects a new ZDC, it uses a preference ranking of the servers in the zone. You can set the preference ranking for the servers in a zone on the Zones tab in the server farm's Properties dialog box. Each zone has four levels of preference for election of a ZDC. The preference levels, in order from highest to lowest preference, are

• – Most Preferred

• – Preferred

• – Default Preference

• – Not Preferred

All servers in a zone are assigned to one of the four election preference levels. When the zone elects a new ZDC, it tries to select a server from the first preference level. If no servers at this level are available, the zone selects a server from the second level, and so on.

When you create a farm, the election preference for all servers is Default Preference, except for the first server added to the zone, which is set to Most Preferred and is the initial ZDC.

On the Zones tab in the console, a colored symbol appears next to each server name to indicate the election preference setting. You can change the default election preference to designate a specific server as the data collector. To do this, set the election preference for the server to Most Preferred. If you do not want some servers to be the ZDC, set the election preference for those servers to Not Preferred.

Managing Users and ICA Sessions

Some of the main tasks of a Citrix administrator revolve around management of users and sessions. If a server has a problem or needs to be taken down for maintenance, then logons must be disabled and later re-enabled. Sessions will also need to be reset, logged out, or disconnected for users so that they can get back into the system with a clean start.

To View Current Users

Current users with sessions on a server can be viewed from the Users tab of either the server's folder or by selecting the individual server in the server's tree from within the MC. The Users tab on the server's folder level allows an administrator to view all of the sessions in the farm. The following information for each session is shown:

• – User The name of the user account accessing the system

• – Server The name of the Presentation Server server for the session

• – Application The Published Application name for the application running in the session

• – Client Name The name given to the ICA client device in the ICA client software

• – Session Displays the type of session and a session number

• – Session ID The numeric identifier of the session on the host server

• – State The current status of the ICA session

• – Logon Time The time the user logged on to the server

Selecting an individual server only shows the sessions on that server. There is an additional column for Idle Time when sessions are viewed from the server level. This column shows the time that a session has been active, but not interacting, with the application.

The current users logged on to a server can also be viewed from a command prompt with the query user command. The query user command only shows the users on the current server, unless another server is specified with the /server:< servername > parameter. It does not return the application or client name information from the command line.

To Enable or Disable Logons

To enable or disable logons from the MC, do the following:

1. Right-click a server in the tree in MC and choose Properties.

2. To disable logons by ICA client users, clear the check box labeled Enable Logons To This Server on the MetaFrame Settings tab.

3. To restore the ability of ICA clients to connect to the server, select Enable Logons To This Server on the MetaFrame Settings tab.

Logons can also be disabled from the command prompt using the change logon command. The command has three options: enable logons, disable logons, or query what the current logon state of the server is.

Managing ICA Sessions

User's sessions can be managed from the MC by viewing the users at either the server level of the MC or by choosing the individual server under the server's tree. Many options are available by right-clicking the individual user.

• – Connect This allows an administrator to connect to a user's disconnected session. If a user is disconnected, this allows an administrator to connect to the user's session and both close applications and save documents.

• – Disconnect This allows the administrator to manually disconnect a user's session, letting the user be gracefully disconnected without closing any applications. The user can then be reconnected from another client.

• – Send Message This permits messages to be sent to the client side of the ICA session. Users can be notified of new applications, upgrades, or system shutdowns.

• – Shadow This option allows shadowing of the selected session as long as the MC is being run from an ICA session. Shadowing cannot be initiated this way from the console of the server.

• – Reset Resetting a session terminates all processes that are running in the session and can cause applications to close without saving data.

• – Status This shows incoming and outgoing traffic as well as compression taking place on the inbound and outbound ICA traffic.

• – Logoff Selected Session This option closes applications and attempts to save changes to information before terminating the session.

• – Session Information Gives detailed information about the ICA session such as session processes, color depth, client IP addresses, screen resolution, encryption, DLLs in use, and client caches.

Managing Application Access

Management of application access is an important day-to-day task. Users or servers may need to be added or removed from individual applications at any time. A user may need one-time access to a specific application or an application may stop functioning correctly at any time.

Adding and Removing Users from a Published Application

Although applications do not have to be published for ICA clients to access them, publishing provides management benefits and makes application access easier for end users. Applications can be centrally managed from the MC on any server.

To give a user access to a published application, open the MC and do the following:

1. Right-click the Published Application and select Properties.

2. Click Users in the left column.

3. Select a domain, and add the users or groups by clicking the Add button.

To remove a user, access the same user tab, highlight the user or group that should be removed and click the Remove button.

If access is given to an Active Directory group, administrators can grant access to new users by adding the user account to the Active Directory Group.

Adding and Removing a Server from a Published Application

The MC can be used to add and remove servers from a published application. Once a server has been added to a published application, users can connect to the published application on the newly added server.

To add or remove a server from a published application:

1. Open the MC.

2. Click the Applications folder on the left pane to view published applications.

3. Right-click the published application and select Properties.

4. Click Servers in the left column.

5. To add a server, highlight the server from the list in the left pane and click the Add button.

6. To remove a server, highlight the server in the list in the right pane and click the Remove button.