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Terminal Services Licensing Diagnosis

Monday, 03 December 2007 by Michel Roth

The Terminal Services Team has a blog post up on a feature in Windows Server 2008 called the Terminal Services Licensing Diagnosis Snap-in extension.

It's an addition to the Terminal Services licensing manager. However, it's not available as a separate tool but it's a "companion" to the Terminal Services Configuration Tool (tsconfig.msc). As it name implies the Terminal Services Licensing Diagnosis helps you to find licensing errors and solve them: "Licensing Diagnosis, has been added to the terminal server configuration snap-in to assist the administrator in managing and maintaining terminal servers. Licensing Diagnosis can analyze a terminal server and highlight potential service-affecting issues that might be encountered due to the configuration of the terminal server/ license server deployment in the network."

The Terminal Services team goes on to give a detailed explanation of the tool. Be sure to read the entire article.

Licensing is a headache. It is an even bigger headache in Terminal Server environments (TSCALs) so this tool is a welcome addition to help us out but I also think we need more. At almost every single customer I face the same issue. The Terminal Server licensing server is a naggy little thing that needs to be in place for Terminal Services to stop squeeking. Once it does (no matter how) it's tends to be forgotten. That is until 91 days later (or due to another cause) and the calls start poring in. The guy who implemented might be gone, has forgotten about it or the knowledge about the Terminal Server licensing server has disappeared altogether for some other reason. People usually have a hard time "learning" about the Terminal Server licensing server under these conditions.

My point is that the new Terminal Services Licensing Diagnosis tool brings Terminal Server licensing closer to the admins because you probably use the Terminal Services configuration tool more often than you do the Terminal Services licensing manager tool. However, I think it should be closer. Put some part of it in the Terminal Services manager (tsadmin.exe) so the that the licensing status is "close" to you. It shouldn't be that hard to make something like that, right? What do you guys think?