Overview

When a term-based license is purchased, The entitlements are active for the duration of the term, Citrix recommends customers renew and re-deploy licenses well in advance of the expiration dates to mitigate risk and ensure business continuity.

Issue Description

A subset of Citrix license orders was impacted where the licenses stopped working before the actual expiration date set in the license file. Customers who deployed impacted license files faced an issue where the licenses expired ahead of expectations.

Symptoms

Customers are expected to renew their licenses well in advance of the expiration dates to ensure business continuity. The expiration date shown in products (Director, Studio, Citrix Licensing Manager) is the actual expiration date when the product will stop functioning as fully licensed.

Citrix products like CVAD Studio and Director have license expiry notices and alerts. These products query license file expiration dates from the Citrix License Server, and alert administrators if license files are approaching expiration or have already expired. Customers are expected to renew entitlements which are nearing the expiration dates in order to avoid issues in their production environments.

Example of license expiration alert in Citrix Director

Example of license expiration alert in Citrix Studio


 

Citrix resolved impacted entitlements on March 17, 2021. Impacted customers (via impacted license files) need to download new license files that contain updated expiration dates and deploy them on their Citrix License Server.

For license files that have not yet expired:

1. Access Manage Licenses on Citrix.com Instructions
2. Re-download license files Instructions
3. Install licenses:
4. CVAD Instructions  starting on step #9
5. ADC Instructions starting on step #9
6. Gateway Instructions starting on step #9
7. SD-WAN instructions

For license files that have already expired:

1. Standard Citrix licensing system behavior for expired licenses (which are no longer functional or of use) is to archive them and hide them from customers' view in the Manage Licenses section of Citrix.com.
2. Customers with impacted license files that have already expired need to reach out to Citrix Customer Service, to obtain an updated license file.
3. Expired license entitlements have been archived and hidden from customer view. These entitlements were included in the March 17, 2021 resolution, but they were unable to be restored into view in the Manage Licenses section of Citrix.com for customer download. Please contact Citrix Customer Service to obtain an updated license file for this use case.