Introduction to Resource Manager (RM)

What is Resource Manager, actually?
Resource Manager collects, displays and stores data about system performance, applications or process use.
Is this not exactly the same things that Performance Monitor (standard available in Windows) does?
Citrix RM definitely has some overlap with Performance Monitor, but adds some extra functionality to it.
These additional functionalities are the benefits of Resource Manager.
Real Time Watcher, on the monitored counters (called Metrics within Resource Manager) you can assign two thresholds (warning and error). If these thresholds are exceeded Resource Manager can warn you via several methods like SMS, E-mail or SNMP.
Resource Manager can store the collected data for a longer time. This makes it possible to generate reports based on current and past activity.
Resource Manager has an option to create billing reports based on self defined costs.
Resource Manager collects, besides the system counters, also Citrix specific data like Application usage, User activity and Farm information.
If your infrastructure already contains an advanced monitoring system like Tivoli NetView, HP OpenView, or CA Unicentre, these solutions provide the Network Manage component. This component ports the data from Resource Manager to the monitoring system, so the data is also available in those systems. Citrix also support this functionality for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).

Introduction to Resource Manager (RM)

What is Resource Manager, actually?
Resource Manager collects, displays and stores data about system performance, applications or process use.
Is this not exactly the same things that Performance Monitor (standard available in Windows) does?
Citrix RM definitely has some overlap with Performance Monitor, but adds some extra functionality to it.
These additional functionalities are the benefits of Resource Manager.
Real Time Watcher, on the monitored counters (called Metrics within Resource Manager) you can assign two thresholds (warning and error). If these thresholds are exceeded Resource Manager can warn you via several methods like SMS, E-mail or SNMP.
Resource Manager can store the collected data for a longer time. This makes it possible to generate reports based on current and past activity.
Resource Manager has an option to create billing reports based on self defined costs.
Resource Manager collects, besides the system counters, also Citrix specific data like Application usage, User activity and Farm information.
If your infrastructure already contains an advanced monitoring system like Tivoli NetView, HP OpenView, or CA Unicentre, these solutions provide the Network Manage component. This component ports the data from Resource Manager to the monitoring system, so the data is also available in those systems. Citrix also support this functionality for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).

Resource Manager Summary Database

Ports used in Citrix

Citrix Printing Terms

Client Printers: Any printer available to a user before an ICA session is launched.

Client Local Printer: Printers that are physically connected to client devices through LPT, COM, or TCP ports.

Client Network Printer: A network printer that appears in the Printers and Faxes folder of a client device and is managed by a print server. This differs from a print device attached to a standard TCP/IP port.

Autocreated Printers: Client local or network printers that appear for the user within an ICA session and use the ICA protocol to send a print job. Autocreated printers use the ICA printer naming convention.

Autoconnected Printers: Printer that are defined for users in their ICA sessions based off the list of network printers defined on the client machine, but are connected directly to the print server. During session initialization, the server attempts to map directly to the print server using the credentials of the user that initiated the ICA session. If the server is unable to establish a direct connection to the location, the printer is autocreated in the session instead of being autoconnected. When a printer is autoconnected, the print job is sent directly from the server running Presentation Server, bypassing the client device, to the specified print server outside of the ICA session.

Autoretained Printers: These are client printers that are added by the user within an ICA session through the Add Printer wizard by browsing and connecting to printers enumerated through the client network print provider. When re-creating a retained printer, all Citrix policies except the autocreation policy are respected. This means that retained client printers are created exactly as the autocreation policy would have selected them. Such printers continue to be re-created with every logon from the same client until the client printer within the session is deleted manually or the remembered printer connection is removed from the client’s properties store. On a Windows client, the properties store can be found in the user profile under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Citrix\PrinterProperties

Autorestored Printers: A manually created client printer attached to a standard client printer port. This kind of printer can be created by an administrator or power user running the Add Printer wizard and manually creating a local printer that is attached to a standard client printer port. These printers are deleted when logging off and re-created during a logon.
Unmanaged Printer: Permanent printers attached to legacy client printer ports. Both the port and printer become permanent fixtures on the server that they are created on. Whenever the specific client is not connected to the server, the port is marked offline. However, if a session is opened from the client, the port is marked online and any queued print jobs begin to print on the specific client printer.

Session Printers: Network printers shared by a print server that are discovered and attached through a session printing policy.

Citrix Universal Print Driver (UPD): A single driver that is installed and configured on the server to which an administrator can assign to all client autocreated printers. This allows for an administrator to not have to manage, install, and duplicate a potentially large set of third-party print drivers through the server farm.

Citrix Universal Printer: A single generic printer using the Citrix Universal Print Driver. It is mapped within each session and is not bound to any printer defined on the client device. It is not enabled by default.

Legacy-style Client Printer Port: The printer ports used by printers created using the legacy naming convention. Such ports are tied to the client workstation by name.
The naming convention is as follows:
\\
Where is the name of the client workstation and is the name of the printer on the client.

Standard-style Client Printer Port: The printer ports used by printers created using the standard naming convention. Such printers are tied to the client workstation by Terminal Services session ID.
The naming convention is as follows:
::
Where is the session ID number of an active session and is the name of the printer on the client.

Citrix Print Manager Service (cpsvc.exe): Provides printer management for all ICA sessions including printer policy enforcement, driver installation, client printer port management, auto-creation of network and client printers, and printer/port cleanup when logging off.

Printer terminology in Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows Printing Terms
Print Device: A physical device that prints text or images on paper or other media. A print device can be physically connected to a server, a client, a computer, or directly to the network.
Printer: A logical representation of a print device. For example, printers are seen in the Windows Printers and Faxes dialog.
Local Printer: A printer that represents a print device directly connected to a machine (for example, to a LPT, USB, COM, or TCP/IP port). All processing, including spooling, de-spooling, and job management are handled by the same machine that generates the print job.
Network Printer: A printer that represents a print device directly connected to a print server. All processing, including spooling, de-spooling, and job management are handled by the print server, not the machine hosting the application that generated the print job.
Spooling: The process of the print driver taking device-independent commands from an application and formatting them into the device-specific format of a particular print device.
Print Server: A computer on the network dedicated to managing printers on the network. The print server can be any computer on the network. Responsibilities include spooling, de-spooling, and managing and prioritizing jobs.
De-spooling: The process of sending device-specific print commands to a print device.
Print Spooler: The Windows service and collection of supporting dynamic link libraries (DLLs) that accept a document sent to a printer by an application and store it on disk (or in memory) until the print device is available to process the job. This collection of DLLs receives, processes, schedules, and distributes documents for printing.
Print Queue: The list of documents waiting to be printed for a particular printer.
Native Print Driver: Print drivers included with the Windows media or provided through Windows Update.
Manufacturer (or Third-party) Print Driver: A driver developed by the device manufacturer for a particular device that is not included in the operating system.
IPP (Internet Printing Protocol): Used by Novell and Microsoft print services to make network printers available to clients through a Web browser interface.
GDI (Graphics Device Interface): The Windows subsystem used by an application to produce device-independent graphical output (for example, to a display or print device).
EMF (Enhanced Metafile): The device-independent format of Windows spool files; it is the encapsulation of the device-independent GDI calls made by an application prior to being converted to the device-specific format that is sent to a physical print device.

LHC

This is the actual copy of the DATA STORE in each member server in the farm. This LHC has a unique numbering so that when ever any changes made to the DataStore will get compared with the help of IMA service. LHC is expanded to Local Host Cache
The LHC is an Access database, Imalhc.mdb, stored, by default, in the %Program Files%\Citrix\Independent Management Architecture folder.

Some time you may need to use DSMAINT RECREATELHC in CMD when IMA service is in stopped state to recreate the corrupt lhc file on the XenApp servers for trouble shooting.

Data Collector

Zone data collectors are communication gateways between zones in farms that have more than one zone. Zone data collectors communicate information used by MetaFrame Presentation Server to list available applications for users and, when users open an application, to locate the most appropriate server on which to run the application.

Zone data collectors store dynamic information about the servers, published applications, server load, and user sessions in their zone. The zone data collector tracks, for example, which applications are available and how many sessions are running on each server in the zone.

Only zone data collectors send messages between zones, reducing communication traffic in the farm because every server does not need to communicate with every other server.