Application Delivery Management

Configure an ADM server only as the pooled license server

September 8, 2025

Contributed by:

C R S

Important:

File based licensing system (also referred to as manually managed entitlements), traditionally used for activating various on-premises components, will be End of Life (EOL) on April 15, 2026. License Activation Service (LAS) is the next generation technology for product activations across the suite of Citrix products. LAS will be the only way to activate and license NetScaler instances after April 15, 2026, supporting NetScaler Flexed licenses (CPL/UHMC), legacy NetScaler Pooled licenses, and NetScaler Fixed term Bandwidth licenses. To remain supported, your NetScaler and NetScaler Console deployments must be on a LAS compatible version.

The minimum required NetScaler versions that are LAS compatible are:

NetScaler ADCs: 14.1 51.x, 13.1 60.x, 13.1 37.x (FIPS)

NetScaler SVM: 14.1 51.x, 13.1 60.x

NetScaler Console Service: will support LAS from early September.

All the other forms of legacy NetScaler licenses such as Pooled vCPU, CICO, perpetual will not be supported with LAS. NetScaler instances leveraging perpetual licenses without an active maintenance will become unlicensed upon upgrade to the above mentioned software versions.

LAS based licenses may not be available to customers where prohibited by law or regulations.

If you have questions or concerns, contact Customer Care. Citrix may limit or suspend your Citrix Maintenance for non-compliance with these requirements without liability in addition to any other remedies Citrix may have at law or equity. These requirements don’t apply where prohibited by law or regulation.

As an administrator, you can configure an ADM server only as the pooled license server. With this configuration, the ADM server only receives licensing data from ADC instances.

Sometimes, you might have the regulatory mandate that requires restricting ADC instances’ data from leaving the regulatory zone. In such situations, you can deploy a local instance of an ADM on-prem server in your regulatory zone to use management, monitoring, and analytics capabilities. When you follow the same approach to use the pooled licenses feature, you have to split pooled licenses across various ADM license servers. This approach does not provide you the flexibility to allocate pooled licenses across your globally deployed ADC instances.

Therefore, configure the ADM server only as the pooled license server. The ADM server receives only licensing data from all ADC instances. So, you can adhere to the regulatory mandate and dynamically allocate pooled capacity licenses across globally deployed ADC instances.

This document explains how to configure an ADM server only as the pooled license server.

How to configure an ADM server only as the pooled license server

Before you begin, ensure no ADC instances are added to an ADM server. Add the ADC instances only after you complete step 4.

Do the following to configure an ADM server only for the pooled license server:

Navigate to Settings > Administration.
In the System Configurations section, select System Deployment.
In ADM Deployment, select ADM only as a pooled licensing server.
Click OK.

This action retains only the pooled licensing feature and disables the following ADM features:
- ADM backup
- Event management
- SSL certificate management
- Network reporting
- Network functions
- Configuration audit
Note

By default, the ADM analytics feature is disabled. Make sure to disable this feature if you have enabled it.

In the confirmation box, click Yes.

The ADM GUI now displays only the pooled licensing feature. And, the remaining features do not appear.
After you configure ADM only for the licensing feature, add ADC instances in the Infrastructure > Instances page.

Note

You can add an ADC instance in one or more ADM servers. When you change the password of such ADC instances, ensure to update the password on all ADM servers where the instance is discovered.

A user can still do some operations of the disabled features in the ADM GUI. For example, event polling and ADC backup. As a super administrator, If you want to restrict such operations, disable user accesses for other administrators using an appropriate access policy. For more information, see Configure Access Policies on NetScaler ADM.

The official version of this content is in English. Some of the Cloud Software Group documentation content is machine translated for your convenience only. Cloud Software Group has no control over machine-translated content, which may contain errors, inaccuracies or unsuitable language. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, suitability, or correctness of any translations made from the English original into any other language, or that your Cloud Software Group product or service conforms to any machine translated content, and any warranty provided under the applicable end user license agreement or terms of service, or any other agreement with Cloud Software Group, that the product or service conforms with any documentation shall not apply to the extent that such documentation has been machine translated. Cloud Software Group will not be held responsible for any damage or issues that may arise from using machine-translated content.

NetScaler Secure Deployment Guide

Configure an ADM server only as the pooled license server

September 8, 2025

Contributed by:

C R S

September 8, 2025

Contributed by:

C R S

Configure an ADM server only as the pooled license server

How to configure an ADM server only as the pooled license server

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