| Every Zone in a MetaFrame XP farm consists of one data collector. If a new MetaFrame XP server joins the zone or the current data collector is unavailable then an election is triggered to determine a data collector. When a zone elects a new data collector, it uses a preference ranking of the servers in the zone. Each zone has four levels of preference for election of data collectors and every server is assigned a preference level. The preference levels, in order from highest to lowest preference, are: Most Preferred Preferred Default Preference Not Preferred By default, a MetaFrame XP server is set to the Default Preference setting. This is the case for all server except the for the first server added to the zone, in which it is set to Most Preferred and it is set to be the zones initial data collector. To designate a specific server as the data collector you will want to set the election preference for the server to Most Preferred and all other servers to something lower. If you do not want a server to be a data collector then you will need to set the preference to Not Preferred. If you create a new zone, the first server that you move to the new zone becomes the zones data collector, and its preference level is set to Most Preferred. Note: As discussed in the design phase, when the server farm exceeds five or more servers or it is experiencing high session traffic, you can reduce the possibility of data collector performance issues and sluggish farm enumeration by setting up a MetaFrame XP server as a data collector or what I like to call a Control Server. This server will be dedicated for acting as the data collector so you will NOT want to publish any applications to it.
The following details how to change a servers data collector election preference: 1. Open the Management Console for MetaFrame XP and right click on the MetaFrame farm properties. 
2. Click the Zones tab highlight the MetaFrame XP server you would like to adjust the preference level on and click the Set Preference button. 
3. Click the desired preference level and click OK. Note: To designate a specific server to be a zones data collector when the next election occurs, make sure that the server has the highest election preference. You can do this by making the server the only one set to Most Preferred level. The zone will elect the server to be the data collector when the next election occurs. 
Repeat the above steps to add the MetaFrame XP servers to the farm to properly configure them for their respective roll.
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