Edgesight for Loadtesting Semi-Free!

Here's some news. Load testing on Citrix is still a pain in the ass.

Citrix is attempting to round out that chasm of product functionality with a new product called "Edgesight for Load Testing". Actually to say that it's a new product is a fat lie. Like many other products (Edgesight included) Citrix just bought up a company and slapped their logo on their product. So in addition to the name being completely lame, it's also incorrect. This product is in no way related to Edgesight. No doubt future integration is planned, but for now it has about as much to do with Edgesight as notepad does.

According to the press release found here:
"Citrix EdgeSight for Loading Testing 2.5 will be available on June 25, 2007, and suggested retail pricing starts at $7,500. Citrix EdgeSight for NetScaler is available as part of the Citrix NetScaler 8.0 Platinum Edition."

In other words, this shit ain't cheap.

Unless of course you found some way to get a license for some kind of discount.

Recently I took a class on Edgesight 4.5, specifically CTX-1800AI. It's a moderately interesting course, but the cool part is that you get a demo license for Edgesight for Load Testing. So what? Well.. the "demo" license you get is good for 2 years! 2 friggin years! What the hell were these guys thinking?

So why pay 7500 for a product when you can get the same product for around 1200 and some change? Just take the course and conduct a very extensive demo of the product. I think most people would agree that two years is adequate to make a determination as to whether or not you actually want to go forward and pay the full licensing cost.

-CG

Edgesight Licensing Hole

Edgesight is a cool product. There's no doubt about it. But why pay for it if you don't have to?

A little history is probably in order..

Edgesight was actually developed by another company called Reflectant. Citrix bought Reflectant as a means to round out their suite of products. Let's face it, Resource Manager is about as useful as loose bowels. Oh sure, it was probably grand back in the days, but it's a dinosaur by modern standards. Hence the need for Citrix to find something to monitor their stuff.

A little known fact is that shortly after acquiring Reflectant, Citrix promptly told most of the other competing vendors (EG Innovations, etc) to go fuck themselves. Citrix is no longer including these vendors in the development process of the Metaframe product suite. Downright bastardly if you ask me, but many of us have seen the big red dot toss its weight around before for no other apparent reason than just to be catty. They refunded their iForum exhibition fees and did a tremendous job in showing their ass.

So anyways, after Citrix purchased reflectant they were in a rush to re-brand the product and get it out there. As is often the case, certain compromises were made with the product conversion for the sake of some deadline. Long story short is that the licensing in 4.0 and 4.2 is not perfect.

It's so imperfect in fact that it is not enforced by the product. Edgesight is licensed by concurrent connection in the same fashion that MPS is. What is supposed to happen is that the product gathers data on the number of users that you are licensed for and then stops once it hits the ceiling. With version 4.0 and 4.2 this doesn't happen. You could be licensed for 10 users and collect data on 10,000. Pretty sweet.

This little bug is fixed in 4.5, which may explain why Citrix is pushing folks so hard to upgrade even though the improvements are somewhat minor in the newer version.

Sometimes the latest and greatest turns out not to be.

-CG

TS License Server and the Chamber of Secrets

So here's the scoop. We're retiring our main TS Licensing server and replacing it with a new box. Sounds simple yes? Yeah not so much.

The basic process is this you get on the phone with the MS Licensing Clearinghouse, which is a boiler room operation somewhere overseas, give them a bunch of numbers, and if the stars line up just right, then they give you a bunch of licenses to install.

So after the myriad of mindless voice prompts:
"Please say the operating system you're caling about"

"Windows 2003"

"It sounded like you said Windows XP. Is this correct?"

"No."
"I'm sorry, please say the name of the operating .."

"Windows 2003"

"It sounded like you said Windows 2003. Is that correct?"

"Yes. Damn this is a pain"

"Are you calling about licensing for terminal server, licensing for.."

"Yes. Terminal Server"

"I'm sorry. Please say your selection again.."

"Terminal server. Terminal Server! Terminal-fucking-server. What the mickey mouse fuck is your problem? None of your other products even sound remotely like the words 'terminal server'. You blind horse fucking toaster.."

"Transferring you to an operator"

"Mother Fucker!"

---Operator picks up---

[in a very thick indian accent] "Halo and tank you fah callind microsoft lichsing. My name is Bill. How can I assist you today?"

"Your name isn't Bill is it?"

"My name is Bill, yes"

"Seriously, what's your name"

[quietly] "It is.. uh.. Prasheid"

"Uh huh.. you guys in Redmond?"

"Redmond?"

"Nevermind."

"Look I need 90 thousand TS device CALs."

"What?" [Noises of the guy shitting a golden and curry scented brick can be faintly heard in the background]

"TS CALs - 90 thousand of em"

"90?"

"Ninety .. Nine.. zero.. thousand. Nine.. Zero.. Zero..Zero.. Zero."

"Hold on"

[Shitty hold music ensues]

"Sir I can't give you that many licenses."

"Our SA agreement should cover that amount.. what's the problem?"

"I'm not allowed to give you 90 thousand licenses"

"But we paid for that many. How am I supposed to get them?"

"You need to call back."

"What?"

"I can only grant 9999 per call"

"So I have to call back 9 more times to get the licenses that we paid for?"

"Yes sir"

"That's bullshit."

"I'm sorry?"

"Nevermind.. alright then.. so let go ahead with it.

"Okay sir.."

"Buttfucker"
----------------------


F-ing rediculous.

Make Your Own Citrix CALs!

It's all about design.

The licensing model has been vastly improved since the days of XP. It's easier and more secure to manage your Citrix licenses. In fact, there used to be a cool utility called TFLKey.exe that would puke up Citrix licenses all day long, including licenses for unlimited servers and connections. You could even activate your existing cals with it.

Of course, using such a utility violates the license agreement (which I guess you wouldn't really need if you had the tool) and may get you thrown in Jail - which is bad because being Bubba's bitch is never fun.

But if it's an architectural design flaw that is a security hole - and you happen to build your environment in such a way that exposes it.. is it still illegal? You're not exploiting or in violation of licensing - and all your servers are working normally. Or are you just leveraging an aspect of the product's design in an unconventional way? Hmm.

Consider the following:

Let's say your environment consists of:
-10 MPS4 servers
-1 Citrix License Server with 100 CALs installed
-1000 users

In this scenario, we're going to potentially consume 100 Citrix CALs, but we're going to get our 1000 concurrent users up and running.

How the hell do we do that? We're simply going to leverage the 30 day Citrix Licensing grace period. You see, each of those 10 MPS servers keeps its own running tally of how many CALs are available. So with the license server up and running you have a max concurrency of 100 users.

Here's where it gets fun.

Kick off all your users and wait a few minutes. At some point, each server will recognize that there are 100 CALs available.

Shut down your license server.

Now you have entered the 30 day grace period where each server thinks that there are 100 licenses available. And since there's no license server to update as users logon and logoff, each server now has the capability to issue 100 cals.

As long as that license server stays offline (for up to 30 days), you can host all of those 1000 users using only 100 CALs.

Obviously the way around this is to bring it back up every 29 days when no users are online for a little while. Once you verify in the event logs on each server that the grace period has been reset you can take it down again, and drive on for another 29 days.

You've just saved your company 315,000 dollars (assuming 350 bucks per CAL).

Is this legal? I honestly don't know.. I think it might be a gray area that could be argued either way. Chances are that Citrix can pay for better lawyers than you or I, so I don't suggest doing something like this.

Is it ethical? No, but all that aside, from a technical perspective it is a pretty cool hack.

-CG