| Microsoft Terminal Services Team On TS Licensing Discovery |
| Wednesday, 28 June 2006 by Michel Roth | |||
|
In this article he talks about the evolution of License Server discovery, and what Microsoft learned along the way by listening to customers. NT 4 Terminal Server Edition This was the first implementation of Terminal Services from Microsoft. I wasn’t involved in this version, but here’s the relevant info: every Terminal Server had a local License Server. This made it really easy for the TS to find the LS. However, there was no way to track CAL usage across multiple Terminal Servers. Also, if you bought 100 CALs and had 5 Terminal Servers, how should you allocate these CALs among the Terminal Servers? Or should you just install all 100 on all the Terminal Servers? A bit of a mess. Windows 2000 It was pretty clear that we needed a central License Server, but how should the TS find the LS? It seems logical that the easiest solution for the admin is to require no configuration at all. The TS should “auto-magically” discover the LS. The easiest solution is to put the LS on a machine that the TS already knows about: the domain controller. That way, the TS just needs to check each DC to see if there’s a license server there. But what about big companies with multiple domains – do we really want to force them to put an LS in each domain? Well, Win2000 had this neat new feature called Active Directory. Why not put discovery information there? That way, all TSs in an AD Site could use the same LS. We called this Enterprise Discovery, I guess because only big enterprises would have multiple domains. But that still left TSs that were in a workgroup (or an NT4 domain with no Win2000 DCs). In that case, there’s no DC to install on, and no AD to put discovery information in. The best we could do in that case was to broadcast, and wait for an LS to respond. Read the whole article here.
Show/Hide comment form
|
|||
