This blog article is a follow up in the Practical Licensing series for Citrix Service Providers. Please see my initial blog for the proper XenApp 6.5 license configuration for a service provider environment   (/blogs/?p=174196020).

As part of the Citrix Service Provider program you are required to report back your license usage (to your CSP Distributor) on a periodic monthly basis. Having a properly configured farm and license server will reduce any headaches and backtracking to itemize license usage during the reporting period. It will also allow you to get accurate growth numbers in order for you to properly plan and scale not only your XenApp Farms, but your overall service provider business.

There are a few options to assist in the reporting of license usage; EdgeSight reports, and the CSP License Reporting Tool. You can find detailed documentation, on both, here (http://www.citrix.com/skb/articles/RDY4312).  However, the focus of this article will be on the CSP License Reporting Tool, as it works for both Base and Premium license SKUs.

Note: Use of EdgeSight within a CSP environment is currently only available as part of Premium CSP licensing. Therefore, any CSPs with Base licensing will be forced to use the CSP License Reporting Tool.

The CSP License Reporting Tool is a PowerShell Module with a single Commandlet to help retrieve license usage from local or remote license servers. It also allows you to filter usage by AD groups, OUs, and time ranges. Having such reporting metrics exposed via PowerShell aids in further automation of your service provider infrastructure and allows you to plug in reporting across functional systems.

Before you begin, you should take a look at the “Important Considerations” portion of the document/hyperlink above. There are a few tips that will aid in accurate license reporting as well as user name formatting. Setting the UDUseDomain registry key on the license server will ensure that you can filter users accurately. This registry key will cause the license server to document the user’s domain name at the time a license is utilized. In turn you can use this domain name to do further filtering; such as, multiple users for a specific customer (i.e., all users for a given domain such as @citrix or @customer1.). Note: the suffix of the fully qualified domain is not captured or reported by the license server as seen in the below sample (i.e., .net or .com is not captured).

Sample Active Directory User
Example Active Directory Account

After the account has established a connection to the farm and a license is checked out, you can run the CSP license usage command to retrieve the list of users.

Properly reported domain users
Note: Base licenses are configured on the license server for this example

If the UDUseDomain key is NOT set, the following user name output format can be expected:

Note: Premium licenses are configured on the license server for this example

Notice that the domain is not being captured by the license server.

It’s strongly suggested that your XenApp 6.5 farm be updated with the following hotfix’s which addresses a few user name formatting issues for users logging in with fully qualified domain names

As always, utilizing the Citrix Service Provider discussion forums for any feedback and community help. http://forums.citrix.com/category.jspa?categoryID=258

Here’s a direct link to the CSP License Reporting Tool: https://www.citrix.com/downloads/xenapp/components/license-usage-utility-for-citrix-xenapp-65

Happy reporting!