I've read the licensing document that describes per-user and per-device CALs
in TS2003. These remind me of the old per-server and per-seat client
licenses introduced in NT 3.5.
The trouble I can see is, I expect no more than five users to connect to a
TS at a time. Per-device mode issues a license to a device (computer) that
expires after X days, but that suggests that this license can't be reclaimed
during this period - if I have five people connected (and I restrict the
number of inbound connections to five) and I'm using per-device TSCALs, all
of these are used up even if one person disconnects to make room for another
person.
Or have I misinterpreted that?
Per-user licensing is even sillier - if I have ten users but five per-user
TSCALs, then those things get issued to users with no way to reclaim a
license for another user - not even an expiry date. Sure, it doesn't bother
decreasing the license count so I can have ten users share five per-user
TSCALs. It might not be legal, but if I'm restricting the number of inbound
connections already, there's no way to have more than five people on at the
same time anyway.
So, for this scenario, which is the best licensing model? I'm already
enforcing the licensed usage by restricting the number of inbound
connections.
This reminds me of a bug in the old license logging service for NT 3.5 and
Remote Access Service. In per-server mode, non-Windows clients
disconnecting wouldn't decrement the per-server usage count, eventually
running out of licenses. The workaround was to change it to per-seat and
ignore the license service event log entries. Eventually MS began
recommending stopping and disabling the license logging service.
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