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What’s new in Terminal Services Licensing for Longhorn
Terminal Services Licensing in Longhorn Beta 3 has several new features that will enable better deployment and management of Licensing environments. We addressed several customer requests in this new release of Longhorn such as per-user tracking and reporting, manual revocation of licenses, better diagnostics and support for WMI providers.Per-User Tracking and Reporting
Prior to Longhorn, per-user licenses were not issued. Thus there was no easy way to track if the usage of per-user licenses was in line with the EULA and the licensing agreements. With Longhorn, you can easily track usage and create reports of how many per-user licenses were issued. Reports can be accessed both through the License Manager UI as well as the WMI providers.
Note that in Longhorn, per-user licenses are only tracked and not enforced. Support for manual revocation of licenses
Earlier, it was not possible to revoke a license issued to a client. Issued licenses would automatically expire after a random period between 52-89 days and become part of the available license pool. Some customers wanted to have the ability to revoke a license and make it available immediately. The typical scenario is where a particular machine would no longer be used (e.g.: a machine was getting formatted) and the license had to be made available immediately to another client without waiting for the expiration period. To address this, we now have support for revoking a license. Through the License Manager UI or the new WMI providers in Longhorn, you can select a per-device CAL that was issued to a particular client machine and choose to revoke it.
Note that you can only revoke 20% of a specific version of a CAL at a time. So if there were 100 Windows Server 2003 per-device CALs installed, you could revoke only 10 of them at a time. Also note that revocation support is currently only for per-device CALs.
Keep an eye on the Windows Terminal Services Team blog as they will be posting more information about licensing of Terminal Server in Windows Server Longhorn