Licensing Issue

[john]

I always remember my old 2000 servers moaning that I was out of NT4 licences for some reason?!?! But never use it on 2003, I keep notes all in my head on my licencing, far more fun!

[mark]

I had a problem with Citrix that I got MS for free to troubleshoot. After about 2 days they gave up and advised me to disable the licencing service

[Pottsey]

“Per User = You buy the number of licenses required for each user and that license roams with the user, so you could have 20 workstations, but only 10 users so this licensing model introduced in Windows Server 2003 would be more appropriate.”
Is the per user license option per username or per person? If I have a class of 8 students sharing 1 username would I need 1 or 8 licenses? I assume 8 but I can always hope its 1.

[Disease]

I normally get device Cals, then each device only has to have the licence as opposed to each user for each server. I choose per device rather than per seat on each server setup and have no problem at all.

[petectid]

I'm positive the link petectid gave is out of date. I apologise if I am wrong on this, however Windows Server 2003 does introduce Per User licensing models.

I think you will find this information current Michael, if you look under the section headed Per Seat Licensing it starts "With Per Seat licensing (sometimes referred to as "Per Device or Per User")". This suggests that there is no difference between Per Device or Per User licensing, therefore when you choose to licence Per Seat you can either buy CALs for your Users or your Devices. The only other method of licensing is Per Server though in a school environment this choice would be unusual?

[petectid]

“Per User = You buy the number of licenses required for each user and that license roams with the user, so you could have 20 workstations, but only 10 users so this licensing model introduced in Windows Server 2003 would be more appropriate.”

Therefore if you have a school with a 1000 users and only 350 devices you intend to buy a thousand CALs when you could get away with buying only 350, one per device, this is still using the Per Seat mode of licensing (sometimes referred to as "Per Device or Per User").

[Michael]

@Pottsey - The key to Microsoft Licenses is to use the method which involves buying the least amount of licenses - so depending how many devices or users you have decides which license route to follow. Most schools would easily have more pupils than workstations throughout school, so Per Seat Device CALs would definitely be the more cost effective route.

@petectid - On closer inspection it's Microsoft causing the confusion. You can have Per Seat Licensing with Per User CALs and Per Seat Licensing with Per Device CALs

[OverWorked]

Alternatively, you can just disable the licensing service and it wont moan at you anymore.

This is just an aside:

Conversely, if you have the evaluation version of Server 2003, the licensing service is disabled by default, so you have to enable it just so you can have it moan at you so you can study the licensing part of the course. The MS training meterials don't tell you that, you have to work it out for yourself.