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How To: Connect to the PCM Console & Setup a Machine Manager for XenServer

In this AskSupport How To video you will learn how to Connect to the PCM Console & Setup a Machine Manager for XenServer

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Transcript : Hello, and welcome to this How To video for Citrix Power and Capacity Management. So in this session, we’re going to take a look at how to initially connect to your power and capacity management console. So once you’ve got all of the components installed and you’ve got the concentrator up and running. You’ve got the SQL database running, all of your agents installed, what are the first steps that you need to do to connect into the power and capacity management console, which connects to the concentrator server, which manages your entire environment. Okay? So a very important step, and we’re going to take a look at how that’s actually done. So, here we go. We’ve got our shortcut here in our desktop for Citrix Power and Capacity Management. Let’s double click on that. And, hopefully, it’ll open our console. Which it has. That’s great. It’s connected in straightaway. Okay. So, in this particular case, it’s working perfectly. But let’s say, for some particular reason, it’s not working. We would have to click on Connect to XenApp PCM. So, if we clicked on that, we would then get the option to connect to our farm name. So, in this particular case, we’ve called our farm PCMFarm, Power and Capacity Management Farm. You can give it any name you want. I mean, it really doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a unique name. So, a common question is, can I have my farm name, my PCM farm name, the same as my XenApp farm name? That’s generally not the recommended thing to do. It’s probably a good idea to give your PCM farm name a unique name, a name that’s not used anywhere else in your environment. Even for identification purposes, that’s a very good idea. So the recommendation is to give your PCM farm an actual unique name to identify it. Okay? So, okay, that’s fine. If we had several PCM farms that we were managing from this particular console, obviously there would be a dropdown list onscreen of all the different PCM farms. We only have one. So we’re going to click on Connect. And straightaway, it’s going to connect in. Okay. So, if for any particular reason it wouldn’t connect in, there might be an issue that you’re not getting connected. The one and only thing that’s really stopping it is going to be the service. The PCM service has not started or just hasn’t started running in the background. So let’s just show you where to check for the PCM service. So if we open up the services console here. If we just go down to Citrix XenApp Power and Capacity Management Services, this guy here. Now in our case, obviously we’re connected straightaway. So it has started and everything is working correctly. But we’re just going to play the devil’s advocate and actually stop that and see what happens in our environment. So if we go back, automatically we’re not connected anymore. So this is the error message that you might see if your service isn’t up and running or hasn’t started for any reason. So it says Error communicating with the Power…sorry…with the XenApp Power and Capacity Management Service. This is the server that it’s trying to connect to, which it can’t actually connect to. And it says concentrator not active. Now this is quite important. Obviously, the concentrator server that we’re connecting to is actually active. But because the service isn’t running, we can’t communicate with it. So, we don’t know what’s actually going on in the concentrator system at the moment. So the error message is concentrator not active. Whereas, the concentrator server might be working absolutely perfectly, but because the service is not running in the background, we’re never going to get connected. So, if we just go back into our services tab here and right click and start that service again. Okay, that should be started. And when we go back in, we should then…excellent. So it’s automatically gone in and connected again for us. So that’s just to show you that, if the service isn’t running for any reason, you won’t get connected. Okay. So the second step, and, again, a very important step, is to set up a machine manager in your environment. So you can see over here, in the top right-hand corner, we’ve got our actions. So the first one is connect to your XenApp Power and Capacity Management farm. You’ve also got Cluster Management, if you want to set up a cluster. You’ve got your Configuration sites. And then you’ve got Machine Managers. So the next step that we’re going to go through here in this particular video, is the Machine Manager. And I’m going to explain to you what that is. So, this is the first time we’ve connected into this environment, so we don’t actually have a Machine Manager set up. So a Machine Manager is going to be the one machine in your environment that’s going to manage a lot of the traffic and a lot of the virtual machines that you’ve got running in your XenCenter and XenServer environments. So just to explain, there are two ways to manage your machines in Power and Capacity Management. So that’s for powering them off and powering them on again. So one is wake on LAN, which is an older, kind of hardware-based technology, where your wake on LAN system sends out magic packets…broadcasts magic packets out to the network to wake up servers on request. Okay? So, obviously, the setting for wake on LAN has to be enabled in the bias of the machine. And then some network card drivers require wake on LAN to be enabled in the network card driver, as well, in order for that to work. So we think that the most common way to have a machine manager running in the background is generally going to be for the XenServer and XenCenter environment. So if we click on Add, we’re going to add our pool master, basically our host server, as the Machine Manager here. So in order to do that, we’ve got to type in the URL, so http://. So the IP address of the server is 10.90.203.110. So that’s just our test environment. And the type of XenServer that we’re going to connect to is 4.0 or newer. Actually 5.0 is fine. It is going to be our primary site. And we’re going to put in the User name. So, generally in XenServer, it’s going to be root. And then the password is whatever you like. Okay. So we’re going to authenticate with user name and password. I think that’s a very good idea for your pool master, because obviously a lot of virtual machines are going to be running off this machine and be managed by it. So, I think authentication is the way to go there. Enable this machine manager? Definitely, because this is what we’re trying to do. So we’re going to click OK on that. And we’re going to try and connect into our pool master here and make sure that we have a machine manager set up in our XenServer environment. So at the moment we’re just connecting. And this can take a minute, just depending on the size of your network and how long it takes to actually get connected to your pool master. But, okay, we’ve got connected quite quickly. That’s quite good. So, we can see that the IP address is just over here. We’ve actually got the server name, as well. It’s a XenServer managed system. It’s our primary site. We’ve actually got 275 virtual machines connected. So we’ve connected in straightaway, and we’ve established our pool master for this particular PCM farm. Okay. So, two relatively simple steps, I suppose. But if we don’t get those configured initially and get them working properly, you will not be able to manage your PCM farm effectively. So, quite simple steps. But if they’re not working, obviously, very, very important steps for the management of your PCM environment.