Citrix Service Provider (CSP) Portal and Citrix Licensing

One of our partners is using the CSP program from Citrix for their customers. Now, every month a CSP usage report must be made manually for all the customers and reported to Citrix.

With the Citrix Cloud Licensing Portal, that step is simplified. There are however a few guidelines for the Citrix Licensing servers that are hosted at the customer(s):

  • Naming convention

It is common to have a default name for a licensing server at the customers, for example “LIC01”. So if this name is used for all the customers, there is no way to differentiate in the new Licensing Portal.
So when you create the license, choose the FQDN of the license server as Hostname.

  • Minimum License Server version

Next is the version of the license server. This has to be Citrix Licensing 11.13.1 Build 16002
In this build the “Call Home” capabilities have been extended to detect CSP–licenses and report product usage to Citrix. This version is part of the Long Term Service Release (LTSR) version (XenApp 7.6)

  • Licensing Model

Now the confusing part. As part of the CSP Program, XenApp is required to be configured to use a usage-based licensing model. Therefore you cannot use concurrent licenses as part of the CSP program. But in the Licensing Model in Citrix Studio it is not possible to choose the User/Device Licensing option if you use XenApp as Edition. So you have to switch to XenDesktop and choose the edition that fits the need.

  • License Types

There are two types of licenses in the CSP Model, those are Premium and Base:

  • CSP Premium SKU – You can utilize XenApp Platinum components
  • CSP Base SKU – You are limited to utilizing XenApp Advanced components

In our case, the customers use “Base Licenses“ which means XenApp Advanced. The licenses that are created from the portal and based on the SKU’s already contain the XenDesktop license.

Next step is to change the Licensing Model matching license.
But wait, that is not possible from the GUI!

Powershell to the rescue!

  • Open a powershell window with the appropriate privilege and load the Citrix Snappin. Note that the Powershell SDK must be installed.
  • Here is the code:
    • Add-PSSnapinn Citrix*
    • Set-ConfigSite –ProductCode XDT –ProductEdition ADV –LicensingModel UserDevice

After these three steps the Citrix Licensing Server is reporting the correct usage to the new Cloud Portal and in an orderly fashion.