Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server does not give out all available licenses (solved)

Posted by Erwin Blonk on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Erwin Blonk
Published on 2010-04-12T14:21:34Z Indexed on 2010/04/13 10:13 UTC
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I installed the Terminal Server role in Windows Server 2003 Standard 64-bits. Still, only 2 connections are allowed. The License Manager says that there are 10 Device CALs available, which is correct, and that none are given out. For good measure I let the server reboot, to no effect.

Before this, there was another server (same Windows, except that it is 32 bits) active as a licensing server. I removed the role first and then then added it to the new server. I then removed the Terminal Server Licensing Server component off the old one and added it to the new one. After that, I added to licenses. When that didn't give the required result, I rebooted to new server. Still, the new server, with licenses and all, acts as if it has the 2 license RDP.

The server are all stand-alone, there is no active directory been set up. Both servers are in different workgroups.

Update (4/12/10): The server has changed the entries in the Terminal Server Licensing a few times. After installing the licenses it added an entry of which the exact phrasing I forgot but it was about temporary Windows 2003 device licenses. Later it added Windows Server 2003 - TS Per Device CAL. The temporary held 2 licenses (standard RDP licenses, I think) and the other 10. At some point, seemingly unrelated from the testing we did, it used a licenses from the new pool.

This morning, 2 licenses were used from the pool of 10 and only 1 from the temporary/RDP pool (I wish I had screenshots to show, it changed every few hours oir so it seems). Although I had already activated the server over the internet, and re-activated it, I decided to go through the whole procedure by phone.

Update 2 (4/12/10) The problem has been solved. It seems the activation over the web, while it said to have succeeded, did not work correctly. After activating by phone, it did work. What was different from the old setup and what put me on the wrong foot from that moment, was that I now need to create seperate user account because a session with one user account will be taken over by someone else when that account is used by that person. On the previous server, it was possible to open several sesions with the same account. We now use Per Device licenses, I'm not sure what was used before.

Thanks all for the replies.

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