[ILUG] Solution needed for terminale server licensing problem.

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Kevin Chen wrote:

> The company I working currently has a problem about Windows 2003
> terminale server Licensing. The thing is we try to setup a Terminale
> server using Windows 2003. But for each thin client try to connect to it
> we need to buy a License, and that cost huge money as company has more
> than 100 PCs.

You want to have 100 PCs connect to a single server with terminal services?
How many clients do you expect at a time?  I imagine that server will have
to be pretty powerful.

As I understand it (feel free to correct me), the license is not for the
client as such, but per client connecting to the server, so using a
linux-based rdesktop client would still require a license if connecting to
your windows server.

> I did found there is a LTSP project under Linux may help, however there
> is another problem the software part, once connected we also need to run
> application on the server eg. MS Project. The way MS charge license with
> MS Project also per devices or per users, this cost huge money too! MS
> really are too greed : (

Linux/LTSP could provide an alternative in that it doesn't require client
licenses.  However, MS Project obviously doesn't run on Linux.  It can run
in WINE apparently, but setting up applications in WINE for a multi-user
environment looked pretty hideous last time I looked.
	http://appdb.winehq.org/

Of course you should still have 100 licenses for MS Project too :-)

If you could find an acceptable equivalent of MS Project which ran natively
in linux or with java, LTSP might be a really good option -- though you'd
need to convince users to accept linux desktops too.

Gavin