I thought I would quickly drop a note about managing your Citrix licenses. This week I decided to investigate why some of my streamed applications were no longer setting the file type associates. It had been an issue for a few weeks, but as it only affected me I wasn’t too concerned.

At first I thought that maybe I had to repackage the application profile, but then I tested a profile that I knew worked in another farm. So that got me thinking. The server that was being affected was a new Windows Server 2008 XenApp 5.0 test farm where I do a lot of testing.

I had recently moved from a XenApp 5.0 (4.5 really) on Windows Server 2003 test farm environment. At the same time I had also replaced the Citrix Web interface server. The test farm was now running the Web interface and XenApp on the same server. Aside from the file type association everything was working fine.

I did have to upgrade the existing test license server, but the servers were getting licenses just fine.

To try and troubleshoot the issue I built another test farm on a single virtual server with the same configuration. It behaved exactly the same. Applications would launch without any issues, but still no file type associations.

So I had ruled out the individual server, the XenApp install and web interface. The only thing left was the license server. So I pointed the test farm at a different production license server that was providing licenses for another XenApp 5.0 farm.

I rebooted the server and what do you know I had file type association set correctly now.

So what was the issue? Well, the test license server had the old Citrix streaming enabler and streaming licenses for desktops installed. It was these licenses, which had been superceded, that were causing the FTA setting to not work.

What is very strange about this is that the applications were launching without any issues and the servers were happily talking to the license server.

So I guess the lesson in this for everyone is make sure you remove old licenses, even if you don’t think it will affect anything.