We have multiple geographically separate sites which each have their own ADDS site as expected. Each site is going to have it's own Terminal Server and I would like each site to have it's own RDS Licensing Server. However:
- We only have one set of CALs that were bought to cover all users across all sites (stupid perhaps!).
So, my question is:
- Can you split those CALs amongst multiple licensing servers - i.e. 120 CALs, 6 sites and 6 licensing servers, one in each site. Each Licensing server having 20 CALs each?
If not,
- We would need to have one licensing server which would serve all the Terminal Servers in every site (it is one domain). However, if Site-to-Site VPNs went down, how would terminal servers service users if it was unable to speak to the central licensing server?
When you buy RDS CAL's you don't buy them for a particular RDS Licensing server, so you can split the CAL's across as many RDS Licensing servers as you need or want to.
Yes, I'm pretty sure you can assign a specific number of CALs to each RDS Licensing server.
In my experience, one time I activated over the phone since the environment wasn't connected to the internet. The MS support guy asked me how many licenses out of the total that I had purchased I would like to activate. I said "all of them." Then he gave me an activation code. I assume that the code would have been different had I said "half of them." That makes sense to me since the RD Licensing Server somehow derived the correct number of licenses that I should have based solely on the activation key that I typed in.
One thing that you lose though, if you split up the licenses, is centralized reporting.