Introduction
The Windows Server 2003 operating system family provides a client license management system known as Terminal Server Licensing. This system allows terminal servers to obtain and manage terminal server client access license (TS CAL) tokens for devices and users connecting to a terminal server. Terminal Server Licensing is a component service of Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003, Standard Edition; Windows® Server 2003, Enterprise Edition; and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition. It can manage unlicensed, temporarily licensed, and client-access licensed clients, and supports terminal servers that run Windows Server 2003 as well as the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system. This greatly simplifies the task of license management for the system administrator, while minimizing under- or over-purchasing of licenses for an organization. Terminal Server Licensing is used only with Terminal Server and not with Remote Desktop for Administration.
Terminal Server for Windows Server 2003 (known as Application Server mode in Windows 2000 Server) provides application deployment and management for users on a variety of devices through its application server mode. Each device or user who initiates a session on a terminal server running Windows Server 2003 must be licensed with one of the following:
Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server Device Client Access License.
Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server User Client Access License.
Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server External Connector.
Note that additional licenses might be needed, such as Microsoft or other application, operating system, and Client Access licenses. The licenses in the preceding list are required even if other add-on products are used on top of Windows Server 2003.
The Terminal Services Licensing service is only associated with licensing for a terminal server client. It is not used to license any other application or service, and does not replace or interoperate with the licensing service for any other component, or alter your rights and obligations under any End User License Agreement (EULA). The Terminal Server Licensing service is not a replacement for purchasing a TS CAL by using the appropriate sales channels.
TS CAL tokens are electronic representations of real licenses, but they are not actual licenses themselves. Therefore if a license token is lost, it does not mean that you have lost an actual license. If you have the documentation to prove that you have bought an actual license, the license token can be re-issued. Conversely, just because you have a license token does not mean that it necessarily maps to an actual legal license.
Terminal Services Licensing is designed to manage these license tokens to allow an administrator to more accurately assess an organization’s licensing requirements. However, there are a few situations in which a license token will not map to an actual license. The administrator should make his best effort to determine if this is the case, and if necessary, purchase extra licenses (but not install the corresponding license tokens) to account for this discrepancy.
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