Wow, what a great two weeks I had, being part of TechEd Australia and TechEd New Zealand. Two very nice events on the other side of the world. 🙂 More on that in a later blog, which I probably will write in the plane back to the Netherlands. Today I want to share a little issue I had preparing one of our sessions during TechEd New Zealand. While being in the process of preparing the session in which we were talking about the Citrix XenApp connector for Configuration Manager 2012 a new application couldn’t be published to the XenApp farm. Strange issue since it was working the week before.
While digging into the Citrix.ConfigMgr.PublishingTask log file I noticed that the HighAvailabilityWorker component was reporting the following error:
Record key: [Farm=”CITRIXFARM”, TaskId=0] exists
Requester: [Machine=”sccm.domain.local”, ServiceInstance=”Default”] does not own record: [Farm=”CITRIXFARM”, TaskId=0]
In other words, the connector on my Configuration Manager server (sccm.domain.local) was trying to connect to the Citrix Farm called CITRIXFARM was not able to connect to the Citrix farm. After restarting the “Citrix XenApp Connector for ConfigMgr 2012”-service it wouldn’t publish the application, tried several things but I ended up reconfiguring the connector.
What happens during reconfiguring is that you need to set up a Service Account for the XenApp Connector, configure which server the SMS Provider is and which server the XenApp Controller is and how they communicate. The XenApp Connector account must comply with the following requirements:
- Account must be a Citrix full Administrator
- Be a local administrator on the system that holds the SMS Provider role
- Must have the “log on as a service” right on the computer on which the XenApp Connector is installed.
- In configuration manager the account must have the following permissions, all permissions on the following objects: Application, Client Settings, Collection, Configuration Item, Distribution Point, Global Condition and Software Update.
Till next time, when I find the reason why this issue occurred I will of course share this here.
Read earlier blogs about the XenApp Connector for Configuration Manager 2012 here
This article titled “XenApp Connector for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Enterprise Setup Considerations” can indirectly lead you to the answer if you’re into adventurous quests:
http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/04/02/xenapp-connector-for-system-center-2012-configuration-manager-enterprise-setup-considerations/
Points to:
XenApp Connector Enterprise Setup:
https://citrix.sharefile.com/d/s4744d4a7b064566a
Which points to:
XenApp Connector In-depth Technical Reference:
https://citrix.sharefile.com/d/sed0b509414240019
Which explains HA in detail.
After looking at the technical reference you’ll find obvious that, after having setup either another connector machine (more likely) or another service instance (less likely) –one of which you certainly did, the first one to pick up the farm in question will continue to be assigned to processing that farm until either of these two things occur:
1 – The owner machine/instance goes down.
2 – You bump up the preference level of the instance you want to manually play with, so that it always takes precedence.
That’s because the High Availability feature exhibits what’s referred to as “stickiness” or “connector affinity”.
Enjoy the light reading 🙂
Thanks for the clarification!