Types of Licensing Available for NetScaler and Access Gateway Enterprise Edition Appliances

Summary

This article contains information about various types of licenses available for NetScaler and Access Gateway Enterprise Edition appliances.

Types of Licenses

Citrix provides the following types of licenses for NetScaler and Access Gateway Enterprise Edition appliances:

Retail NetScaler (physical box) License: This is a license for the physical appliance. This license helps you to enable all necessary features of the appliance and 5 Secure Socket layer (SSL) Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections. By default, this license is allocated to Hostname “ANY” in the MyCitrix Web site. You cannot change this allocation.
Other NetScaler licenses: These licenses include Internal, Partner USE, DEMO, EVALUATION, or VPX. You need to allocate these licenses to to Host ID of the appliance.

Refer to the following Knowledge Center articles for more information:

• CTX121062 – How to License NetScaler Appliances Using the Activation System/Manage Licenses Tool on MyCitrix.com
• CTX122426 – NetScaler VPX Licensing Guide

Access Gateway Platform License: You must upload this license to increase the Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) connections up to 10000.

Refer to the following Knowledge Center article CTX125567 – How to Configure an Access Gateway Enterprise Edition Appliance with Unlimited ICA Connections for more information.

Access Gateway Universal Licenses: This license increases Full SSL VPN connections.

You need to allocate some of these licenses to the NetScaler Licensing Hostname, which is configured in the /nsconfig/rc.conf file. This hostname is not necessarily the same Hostname that was created by running the set ns hostname, unless you have configured otherwise. By default, the hostname in the /nsconfig/rc.conf file is “ns”, as shown in the following command output:

root@ns# grep hostname /nsconfig/rc.conf
hostname=”ns”

If there is an issue with the hostname allocated for the Access Gateway Platform license, then you can verify the content of the /var/log/license.log file, which should be similar to the following sample content of a /var/log/license.log file:

34 (CITRIX) Wrong hostid on SERVER line for license file:
9:50:34 (CITRIX)       /nsconfig/license/license_20110316121246.lic
9:50:34 (CITRIX) SERVER line says HOSTNAME=My-Netscaler, hostid is HOSTNAME=ns
9:50:34 (CITRIX) Invalid hostid on SERVER line

In the preceding sample, the license is incorrectly assigned to the My-Netscaler hostname considering that to be the Licensing Hostname because the hostname was set as My-Netscaler by running the set ns hostname command. However, the rc.conf file has the hostname set as “ns”.