Points to remember in Citrix

Below points are very useful while attending interviews in citrix. Most of us know these statements, but just to gather all the key points at a single place, I have started this post. I will keep it updated everytime.

• If the data collector fails, existing and incoming sessions connected to other servers in the farm are not affected. The data collector election process begins automatically and a new data collector is elected almost instantaneously.
  
• The data collector election process is not dependent on the data store.
   
•  If the data collector goes down, sessions connected to other servers in the farm are unaffected.
• If a data collector goes down, there is no single point of failure.
   
• A primary domain controller or backup domain controller must not become the data collector for a zone.
   
• If a new MetaFrame server joins the zone or the current data collector is unavailable then an election is triggered to determine a data collector.
   
• Default time that inactive users will be logged off from the web interface is 20 mins in xenapp 5.0

• Individual Presentation Server will continue to function for 30 days after it loses connectivity to a Citrix License Server.
   
• Every five minutes the license server and the products send a heartbeat message to each other to verify that they are mutually communicating. 

• Some Citrix products can operate in a disconnected mode (not connected to the server). These products allow a user to check out a license and operate the product for a preconfigured period of time that is set by the administrator. In this case, heartbeat messages are not exchanged. One example of disconnected mode is when a user checks out a Password Manager license for a laptop, and then uses the laptop when it is not connected to the server.
   
• If for any reason, a Citrix product cannot contact the license server to request a license, the product goes into a grace period. This grace period is set by Citrix and differs depending upon the product.
   
• During a license server connectivity outage, yes, you can reboot your member Presentation Servers, and yes, you can reboot your data collectors. The mps-wsxica_mps-wsxica.ini file will stay put as long as you don’t actively delete it.
   
• If your environment includes a different directory service (such as Novell Directory Services for Windows) or you are a Citrix administrator without permission to manage Group Policy, use the Delivery Services Console to create policies for your farm.
   
• In Active Directory environments, the farm GPO takes precedence over the local GPO on the server in the event policy settings conflict.However, Active Directory GPOs take precedence over the farm GPO.
   
• If you are not seeing all the file types for your application this is because they may not yet be in the datastore. To pull the information from a server’s registry, right-click the server in the console select Other Tasks–>Update file types from registry. To pull FTA from all your servers right-click on the root of the farm and select Other Tasks –> Update file types. Bear in mind this is going to pull from all your server in the farm so if you have a large farm it may take a while.
   
• Remember you must also configure Client Drive Mapping for Client to Server content redirection to work.

• client to server redirection: update file types from registry.
   
• server to client redirection: u can set it in policy.

• If the license server is behind a firewall, you must assign a static port to the Citrix vendor daemon. 

• MS Access and SQL Express databases can only be accessed indirectly where you have the option when using MS SQL, IBM DB2 or Oracle.
   
• The Farm Metric Server gets its information from the zone data collector, which is updated every 15 seconds by each MetaFrame XP server