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License Compliance Monitoring with Terminal Services Log

It’s always good to know whether your investment in software licenses has been optimized, and with tight budgets nowadays this issue is more relevant than ever.

For all Terminal Services Log users, the process of checking if you are over-licensed or under-licensed for a specific software product takes only two very simple steps:

Tell us what licenses you own (this is usually “offline data”, so we cannot know this unless you tell us)
Check your license compliance in several available reports

Step 1: Tell us what licenses you own

In Terminal Services Log click on Tools > Manage Licenses and a new window showing licenses you have will appear:

Naturally, you can edit or delete all individual items. We’ll show you how to add a new one – just click “New License”, choose application name and enter type and number of licenses.

A huge number of most used applications can be selected from the drop down menu in the Application Name field. You can also add your own if you like.

After you have edited the existing license information and entered new products, you have done everything required for Terminal Services Log to give you reports on License Compliance.

Step 2: Check your License Compliance

Terminal Service Log provides you with 4 reports regarding software licenses you use:

Used Application Licenses – number of licensed used per each application
Application License Compliance – shows if you are under-licensed or over-licensed for a certain application
Application License Details – reports on each single license and user / device that consumed it during a selected period of time
Client License Compliance – Remote Desktop licensing and Citrix licensing reports

All of those reports are accessed through the “License Reports” section on the left of the Terminal Services Log software. Each report can be exported to Excel (including Dynamic PivotTable and Dynamic Worksheet), PDF, HTML and CSV file. Number of filtering options is also available.

Let’s take a look at the mostly used one, “Application License Compliance” report:

It’s easy – now you have information on which licenses to purchases, the ones you have too many of or find out which products are perfectly licensed.

January 4th, 2011 | Tags: licensing
Posted in how to, new-features | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

Which licensing model should I choose for my environment?

When it comes to Remote Desktop licensing (formerly Terminal Services licensing), there is always a question about the optimal licensing model. But what if you could have a report that will ease the decision and allow you to make a better one based on real usage of your Remote Desktop / Terminal Services farm.

Remote Desktop Services come with a 120 day grace/trial period that will give you enough time to test the optimal licensing strategy. Our product, Terminal Services Log, will gather the necessary data and make your decision much easier. You will find out which licensing model is the best for your scenario and how many licenses you need!

In the above given screenshot, on a trial Remote Desktop Services farm we tracked both per Device and per User licenses. The report shows the number of used licenses for each license type.

The report clearly indicates that this farm is accessed by more devices than users (a user is using more than one device e.g. laptop, desktop, mobile phone). In this scenario it is logical to purchase per User licenses for this farm. You only need 574 User licenses, compared to 773 Device licenses. Even if you purchase +10% more licenses you will still be saving more then 20 000$ on licenses you do not need!

To download Terminal Services Log immediately please use this link.

April 8th, 2010 | Tags: licensing
Posted in how to, Terminal Services Licensing | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

How you can use Terminal Services Log to optimize licensing costs

In a Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Services) or Citrix Environments users can use a number of different applications. In a heavily used system there could be hundreds of applications running on the servers in a farm. Administrators in charge of such farms need to ensure all applications are properly licensed. But how are you going to monitor all these licenses and their usage across server farms?

This is where Terminal Services Log comes to rescue! Our comprehensive reporting infrastructure allows you to both define the number of licenses purchased and automatically track how these licenses are being used across your farm.

Tracking application licenses

Let’s say you want to track the number of used Office Licenses.

Here is what you need to do:

Go to File > Preferences > Licenses [tab]
Click Add License
From the License Type Dropdown choose Application per Device License (We support tracking of per User and per Device licenses. )
From the Process Dropdown choose Microsoft Office Word
Enter the number of licenses you have purchased

I have entered 4x Word, 10x Excel and 20x Access licenses. Sample usage report is displayed on the figure below.

This report gives me important information about the current licensing state of my farm. As the sample report shows: I am only license compliant with Word, there are too many Excel licenses and too few Access licenses.

Benefits

There is a number of benefits from having reports like this one:

You can optimize costs for licenses you do not really need. (e.g. I could cut the number of Excel licenses in the above given example as I have 5 more than I really need)
I can detect if I need to purchase more licenses on my annual renewal date
I can change between different licensing schemas to detect if I could save more money with different licensing schema (per user/device)

Different licensing schemas we can track

Terminal Services Log allows you to track five different licensing schemas:

For applications

Applications per User License
This license schema is being used for applications that are licensed per user i.e. you have to purchase a license for each user that uses the application
Applications per Device License
This license schema is being used for applications that are licensed on a per device basis i.e. you have to purchase a license for each device this application is being used from. (e.g. So in case you are remoting from two different laptops you need 2 licenses.)

For farms or servers
The following license schemas allow you to track licenses for a farm or single server. This typically includes Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Services) CALs or Citrix Licenses. There are 3 different schemas:

Farm per User License
This license schema allows you to track the number of unique users that connected to a remote server.
Farm per Device License
This license schema allows you to track the number of unique devices (e.g. laptops, workstations…) used to connect to a remote server.
Farm Concurrent User License
This license schema allows you to track the maximal number of concurrent users that connected in the given period. This license type is typically used to track Citrix Access Licenses.

March 25th, 2010 | Tags: how to, licensing, reports
Posted in how to | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Slow log-off when printing from 32bit app on x64 Windows Server 2008 R2

If you define 32bit app startup environment for the users, these users might experience a problem with slow log-off. This problem does not affect Full desktop and it does not happen if a user has not printed something from an application.

In case you have Terminal Services Log installed on your server you can check processes being run for each user session. All 32bit sessions will have a process splwow64.exe running. By further investigation we found out that the session will not end until this process does not end (in few minutes). This process is converting between 32 bit and 64 bit applications. The process remains in memory in order to increase system performance and unloads from memory after the last print job.

Adjusting Process TimeOuts

You can define how long the process stays in memory. Open regedit and find the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\
Create new 32bit DWORD SplWOW64TimeOut and set it to one minute (decimal 1). This will add one minute delay to unloading the process from the memory.

If you want to unload the process immediately and log off instantly after the print job is finished we need to add one more registry value.
In regedit open:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\SysProcs
and add new 32bit DWORD called splwow64.exe and set it to decimal 0.

Now the session with startup environment setup will log off immediately after the print job is finished if that is requested by the user.

Additional Reports with Terminal Services Log

You can use Terminal Services Log to closely monitor processes on a Remote Desktop Server. Click here for more details about application reports in Terminal Services Log.

Application Report - Terminal Services Log

February 24th, 2010 | Tags: log-off problems
Posted in how to | By: Frane Borozan | No Comments »

Client disconnects due to error in the protocol stream (Source TermDD, Event ID 56)

Problem

Sometimes you might receive the following error when remote controlling another client:
The Terminal Server security layer detected an error in the protocol stream and has disconnected the client. Client IP: …

Cause

Error occurs when a client with RDP client below RDP 7 build 6100 connects to any other client for remote control, or even when RDP 7 client remote controls anything under RDP 7. client.

Solution

While searching for a solution I noticed that people suggested to set the network card to auto sense. But what should you do in case you are running Terminal Server as virtual machine in Hyper-V . The simple solution, you must upgrade all Remote clients to latest available, as of this text RDP 7 client build 6100. (link).

You can also use Terminal Services Log 3.0 to detect which users are using older RDP Client Versions as shown on figure below. Click here to download trial.

February 24th, 2010 | Tags: client disconnects, rdp
Posted in how to | By: Frane Borozan | 1 Comment »

Terminal Services Log