An important question we often hear from our customers is how do we count RDP licenses? Why are so many licenses used?
In this article, we'll describe the approaches to license counting and how to make sure you have the right number of licenses.
First of all, let's clarify an important point - it is the user's SESSIONS that are subject to licensing.
No more than two people can work simultaneously on each Windows Server 2012 R2/2016/2019 guest OS server without deployed RDSH (Remote Desktop Session Host) server role and licensing server. When connecting a third one, Windows will prompt you to choose who you want to disconnect. The disconnected user's session will not end, it will remain in the system and he will be able to continue working later by selecting and disconnecting one of the two current active users as well.
RDSH role is set when more than two users should work on the terminal server simultaneously. This means that at any given time there can be as many active sessions on the server as the VM owner needs.
Terminal license fees are based on number of current sessions in guest OS regardless of their status, i.e. both active (connected users) and disconnected (disconnected sessions) are counted. The mechanism is defined by the agreement with Microsoft and C4Y as a partner must follow these rules.
You have the RDHS service and the Remote Desktop Licensing Server service installed. You rent 5 licenses, but you may have, for example, 10 users on the server. Only 5 of these 10 users can be active simultaneously, but if the other 5 users logged on and did not log off correctly using Log Out, their session is still logged on but not active. Sessions that were not logged out and were simply closed with a "cross" continue to run in the background as "disconnected" and are charged a certain number of hours by the MS algorithm itself.
How can I see how many sessions are running in the system?
There are several options. The simplest one is to open Task manager and in the tab Users see the number of sessions and their status.
Alternatively, run the command line and run the command qwinstat.
And how to make sure that extra sessions are not included in the license accounting?
First, notify users to log out correctly by Log Out rather than clicking on the cross in the RDP window.
Second, using the Local Security Policy functionality of the guest operating system, you can set the time to automatically end sessions at a specific interval and session status.
To do this, open a command line (cmd.exe) and run the command gpedit.msc. After executing the command, the Group Policy Manager opens
After applying the parameters, you must run the command gpupdate /force at the command line as an administrator, so that the policy takes force and the user sessions are terminated based on the limits set.
Recommended policy values from Cloud4Y: Session reset time 72 hours ( 3 days), in Disconnected or Active but Idle status.
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