EdgeSight is the monitoring product Citrix obtained when they purchased Reflectent Software in 2006. In XenApp 5 it now replaces the old Resource Manager. The Basic features (replacing Resource Manager) are included with the XenApp Enterprise Edition license. You need additional EdgeSight licenses to run the Advanced features and the Endpoint monitoring features. You may also find you need an extra MS SQL Server license.
From the Installation Guide:
- Basic agents provide the Resource Management capability that is included in XenApp-Enterprise Edition and require only that you have a XenApp Enterprise license available on your Citrix Licensing Server.
- Advanced agents provide the fully featured version of EdgeSight for XenApp and require that you have either a XenApp-Platinum Edition license or an EdgeSight for XenApp license available on your Citrix Licensing Server.
When you install, you choose what features you are licensed for. You can also change this later in the configuration panel.
EdgeSight requires an installation of MS SQL Server Reporting Services, which in turn requires IIS. It also needs an MS SQL database engine. This presents some interesting choices. I usually aim to use a shared MS SQL Server resource, so it can be properly administered. However a non-production service can often use the free MS SQL Server Express edition.
But EdgeSight collects a lot of performance data. It is also rather unusual in creating a separate file group for each reporting period. By default it creates 8 500 MB database files. MS SQL Server Express has a 4 GB database size limit. So it is not really suitable for EdgeSight in production mode.
If you have a shared Reporting Services installation you should be able to use that. If not, you need to install Reporting Services somewhere else. However an installation of Reporting Services requires a full license of MS SQL Server. MS SQL Server Express Advanced contains Reporting Services. But you can only use the Express Reporting Services against a database on the same server.
So we end up with EdgeSight 5.1 on Windows Server 2008 in practice requiring either a shared Reporting Services, or a full SQL Server license.
If you have a large Citrix server farm you may consider that an additional SQL Server license is a minor cost. But if you have a small farm and can no longer use Resource Manager, you may be surprised to find you need to pay for an additional SQL Server license to use EdgeSight. You might just get away with it by changing the default file group sizes and setting aggressive purging.