Please just the basics - MS RDS Licensing, in the Licensing forum on BrianMadden.com
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Please just the basics - MS RDS Licensing, in the Licensing forum on BrianMadden.com

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JB posted on Sun, Aug 14 2011 3:22 PM

I hope this is the right forum.  Though I've supported a Citrix PS 4.0 environment (I did not set it up but it was set up solidily by a Citrix consultant years ago) I'm missing many pieces - one of which is understand MS licensing - per user mode.

I don't care about VDI or anything virtual (at least not yet) so have just a few, what I hope are "basic" questions.

Our current environment is 4.0 with "per-user" licensing configured and we will keep "per-user" while moving over to XenApp 6.0.

Currently we have 800 potential XenApp users of which 400 to 500 are regular users. (By potential I mean they all are in AD group and have two-factor tokens assigned and could login but many have never found the need).

1) User Joe Blow became a Citrix user at the beginning of the farm creation but has since left the company.  Is his license reusable?  If so, is there some period of time he must be gone in order to re-use his license? 

2) If Sally is one of those users who log in a maximum of once per month (and let's say I have a certain percentage of users like Sally) and Harry is one of those users who logs in every day (and a smaller percentage of users are like Harry) is there some type of monthly, quarterly or yearly reconciliation that could be done so as to not over pay or under pay?

I've been trying to research and understand so if there are any really good posts on the subject that anyone can point me to it would be much appreciated.

TIA

JB

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Microsoft Licensing is based on a named user model, as opposed to the Citrix concurrent user model.

In your first instance, user Joe Blow's TS/RDS CAL will free up and be available for another user.

In your second instance, you would need licensing for Sally (and all those like her) as well as for Harry. Since you use two-factor tokens, assuming that all users only access via a method requiring a token, purchase your licensing based on the number of tokens you have.

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JB replied on Mon, Aug 15 2011 11:32 AM

Sounds good.  Thanks. - JB

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