Terminal Server Licensing

[MISAdmin]

Most of my experience has been with Metaframe 1.8 on NT4, but now I am working at a place running Citrix XP on a 2000 Server.

We will eventually have about 50 users accessing apps via Citrix. Right now, the load is very light (about 10 or less at any given time). I purchased 20 ICA client licenses and 20 Terminal Server Licenses figuring no more than 20 people would be logged in simultaneously for awhile. Here's my problem...

When I installed Terminal Services, it created temporary licenses. I installed and registered the 20 terminal services licenses I purchased. Some of the users, upon logging in, if I look in Terminal Services Licensing,I can see are using the registered licenses, but about half a dozen are using the temp licenses and they will soon expire.

First question, since they are connecting via ICA and I have plenty of open ICA licenses in the pool, will this keep them from logging in??? Second, my problem with the Terminal Server licenses is that they don't expire for awhile after they are issued and I don't see a way to change that... Therefore, when the temp license expires, there won't be any registered licenses open since they haven't expired for the previous user yet... Is there someway I can make these licenses expire daily??

 

[kerrymc]

I had to tweak the Registry on every Users PC to remove reference to MS Licensing.
That cured my problem which is very similar to yours, but a different answer!

 

[MISAdmin]

kerrymc,

What problem were you having and which key did you tweak? Not sure I'll go that route... there must be something I can set from server side.... Just curious.

 

[mbarlam]

kerry, what is the tweak? I am having a problem where the TSL Manager will not release old or removed machines. Most of my clients are Win95 machines.

 

[kerrymc]

I have max 150 users accessing apps via Citrix. Like you, the load is very light (about 40/50 concurrent), but it’s set to expand rapidly.
I purchased additional 100 ICA client licenses and 100 Terminal Server Licenses also figuring that users would be around 50 people would be logged in simultaneously for a while.
My problem... almost identical to yours. Plenty of spare license capacity so why???
First time they logged in – no problem. Second time they were failing. At first we could find no pattern.
Then we discovered that MS was allocating a licence key to the Registry for each user.
I wish I could have done something Server side but 60+ laptops had to have this done to it:

HKEy_Local machine
Software
Microsoft
Delete “licensing”
and all was well and still is!
Good luck!

 

[MISAdmin]

Thanks for the input. I've got one user whose temporary license expires tommorow... I'll give it a try on her machine and see what happens... I'll post again with my result.

 

[MISAdmin]

mbarlam, In addition to what I mentioned above, I'm having that trouble too. (Not releasing licenses for old Win95 clients)

I was going to try out kerrymc's fix on a test workstation, but it's an old Win95 machine and doesn't have that registry key (nor could I find one similar). My Win98 workstation didn't have that exact key either... It did have a MSLicense key under Microsoft which looked like what kerrymc was talking about... but I'm not having trouble with my workstation and didn't want to just blindly go around deleting keys when I'm not sure everything they're linked too...

Basically, what I found so far is that MS changed TS Licensing drastically with 2000. You may already know this -but it's new to me ;-) Basically, instead of you just telling the server you have xx number licenses and it saying "ok" , you actually need to register the licenses now, more like the way Citrix handles the license... The difference is that Citrix pools the licenses... The terminal server licenses on my setup certainly aren't acting as though they are pooled. MS's deployment doc states that TS licenses are per seat and if you try to load TS on a W2K server that is per server you will have to convert it. Unfortunately, I have about 50 users... less than 10 are accessing at a time, but since the per seat licenses are being assigned to the specific workstation and not releasing... that causes an issue. You don't have this problem with W2K and XP clients as the TS Cal is built in... I think I may bite the bullet and just buy another 20 Cals... not the cheapest solution, but it will resolve my issue...

 

[mjbrown]

The problem is that the license tokens are assigned per device accessing the Citrix Server. If you have 10 users that access the server from 15 workstations, you need 15 licenses. If you need to reinstall an OS, the license token is assigned to that OS and will be temporarily lost (until it expires in 52-89 days). So the next time they log on, they will get a temporary license that will expire in 90 days. The one that was used before reinstall will expire in 52-89 days and will be added back into the pool of available licenses upon it's expiration. The PC with the temporary license will attempt at every logon to get a permanant token. When one is found, it will add that to the registry (I don't know if the temp token is deleted from the registry at this point). They could have made this whole process much easier by making it similar to Citrix and having a concurrent connection license scheme. The other thing that they were trying to do is have people get fed up with this process and upgrade all desktops to Win200 Pro or WinXP Pro as you do not need seperate Terminal Server CAL's for these OS's. They get their licences from a 'built-in' pool on the license server with is inexhaustable. The only other thing I can think to add is that if you are running on thin-client that do not have a local store, the tokens are tracked in the registry of the Terminal,Server and not on the local device. I hope this makes sense, but this is what I have been looking at for the last 3 days as we are going to be going to Win2K TS and Citrix XPe.
Sorry so long winded!!! Mike Brown CCA

 

[MISAdmin]

Thanks, mjbrown.

That was exactly the resolution I had gotten to yesterday. In originally setting up the system, I wasn't aware of the changes to Microsofts licensing for TS's under W2K... Of course, the reseller I was dealing with, who knew what I was trying to accomplish didn't say anything about it either. I would have felt much better about including an additional 20 licenses up front with the initial order then having to go back now and get them approved all over again, but, alas, that is what I must do...

I'd love to migrate everyone to W2K or XP, and Microsoft did manage to get me fed up with their licensing ;-), but we are a non-profit and most of our Win95 clients are using P133's with 16-32mb of RAM... Therein, one advantage of Citrix, where I didn't need to worry about upgrading the workstation to run the app. Of course Micrososft has now made it so I need to buy additional licenses... guess you need to expect that from Microsoft....

 

[mjbrown]

Microsoft released a hot-fix due to complaints on the licensing, I don't know if you have it installed, but this should fix things so you don't need to purchase more licences that you have devices connecting...
Q287687 Terminal Server License Enhancements:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q287687

also a follow up article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q294655

Good Luck and remember Metaframe 1.0 for UNIX!!! (although I assume this would require more training classes away from the office).

Mike Brown CCA