Terminal Server Licensing.

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25 10 2006

Terminal Server Licensing.

Today I spent approximately 2 hours on google and then a further hour on the phone to Microsoft to try and get to the bottom of a licensing question that I had.
Microsoft licensing is an absolute abortion, the fact that you can do a six month course on the topic shows what an absolute bun fight it is to get it right. And of course Microsoft don’t have any clear guidelines, they just turn up at your site 6 months down the track and do an audit and then rape you for copyright breaches that you never knew you were making.

My question was when installing a terminal server into an existing domain, what licenses are required, I was sure that I needed TSCALs and also that I needed some new CALS (because we were introducing new users/ devices to the system) and obviously we need a Server OS licence. But what I wasn’t sure about was whether I needed a CAL for every server in the domain per user/ device (e.g. 2 CALS per device now).

No one at MS seemed to know the answer to this question which disturbs me because I would assume it is a fairly common scenario. Anyway eventually I got put though to someone who had a clue whom informed me :
“CALS are purchased for your Windows Server managed domain. Not for individual servers”. So after clarifying this several times I accepted his answer.

God only knows if this is right or not but I have since talked to various IT professionals (with simlar setups) who say they also believe this is the way it works.

I guess it makes sense because in some of the larger networks you would end up buying 10+ CALS per user/ device which would get prohibitively expensive. Of course it wouldn’t be like Microsoft to make things prohibitively expensive would it?! All I know is thatÂ GPL is a lot easier to get your head around than M$’s.

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