Tuesday, March 24, 2009

[THIN] Re: W2K8 TS Licensing - Separate TS License Servers for Separate Farms

Adam,

 

In W2K3 you could already restrict your license service when installed in domain/entreprise licensing mode to only the terminal servers added to a local/domainlocal computergroup on the license server itself.

Remind this is only when you install a license server in domain/enterprise mode.

 

Terminal Servers by preference (unless hardcoded in the registry) will do an LDAP lookup to track License servers.

Unless you set restrictions any hostile access to an license server will take place.

So you could easily setup restrictions as to only allow certain Terminal Servers to access a specific departemental budgeted license server. I feel confident that Windows 2008 still builts in this principle.

 

Regards,

 

Stefan

 

 


From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Adam Haas
Sent: dinsdag 24 maart 2009 15:12
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] W2K8 TS Licensing - Separate TS License Servers for Separate Farms

 

How can we maintain separate TS license servers with W2K8 for different divisions/locations?  Is trying to restructure budgeting and installing a centralized license server our only option? 
 
We have several IT independent divisions/locations, but we have a single AD domain.  Many of these divisions have their own Citrix farms.  With Windows Server 2003, they each had their own TS licensing server and configured terminal servers to manually discover their local TS license server.  This has been the ideal situation given division independence in both IT functions and budgets.
With Server 2008, however, how can we maintain this situation?  Budgeting is decentralized and Corporate does not have the budget to buy TS CAL's for the entire corporation.  We need each division to continue to maintain their own licensing servers and licenses.  With that in mind, we do not want to make all the TS licensing servers discoverable in the domain and do not want all of them writing to the user objects in the domain if using user CAL's  (so the TS license servers will not be added to the 'Terminal Server License Servers' group).
 
There are occasions when the same user may connect to terminal servers in the different farms at the different divisions.  (It is rare, but it does occur.)  We realize that the current scenario results in purchasing multiple TS CAL's for that user for the different farms, but this is our ideal situation with decentralized budgeting.  This is yet another reason for not adding all of the multiple TS license servers to the 'Terminal Server License Servers' group with Server 2008.  We do not want all of these different division TS license servers modifying the same user object.  We suspect that would be a problematic scenario.
 
Divisions have been told that we will not support Server 2008 for terminal services--specifically because of these licensing issues.  However, we now have a division that has not gotten that message.  They've purchased 2008 CAL's and installed Server 2008 terminal servers and a licensing server.  They now want Corporate to add it to the 'Terminal Server License Servers' group in the domain, and Corporate is refusing as they have been directed.  The division, however, wants to use what they've purchased.  How do we support this given our political and budgeting structure?


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