22 | MetaFrame Presentation Server Reviewer’s Guide |
New Features of MetaFrame Presentation Server
The following new features and enhancements are included in this release.
Simplified Licensing for MetaFrame Access
Suite Products
New technology in MetaFrame Access Suite software simplifies managing your licensed products in the following ways:
•You centrally manage and monitor license usage
•You can access your licensing data remotely
•You can create reports allowing you to analyze trends in license usage
•An electronic backup of all licenses is stored on the Citrix Web site
•You can share licenses across farms
For more information about the license server, see “Licensing Evaluation Versions of Citrix Products” on page 37.
Enhanced Support for Large Farms
Zone data collectors now monitor server load information for their own zone instead of the entire farm. This behavior reduces traffic among zones when users connect to applications, especially in large farms where zones are connected across high latency links.
In earlier releases, a data collector automatically sent updates about server loads in its zone to the data collectors in other zones. This change in communication is designed to reduce interzone network traffic. Instead of each data collector maintaining load information for all servers in the farm, the data collector maintains load information only for the servers in its own zone. This behavior is especially beneficial in large farms.
Zone Preference and Failover
A new policy rule enables you to direct user connections to preferred zones and set transparent failover to backup zones when preferred servers are unavailable. When users open applications, the Zone Preference and Failover policy rule directs their connections to the server with the highest zone preference and lightest load.
The Zone Preference and Failover rule is available if you are using the Enterprise Edition of MetaFrame Presentation Server.