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Troubleshooting Terminal Server Licensing Issues
Verifying License Server Installation
The most popular issues are the result of incorrect setup or configuration, or failure to fullyunderstand the licensing process and requirements. Believe it or not, the cause of many licensingissues comes down to simply overlooking the fact that a license server is necessary. Becauseterminal servers have an automatic 180-day grace period, people sometimes forget to install andactivate a license server. Once the grace period runs out, the terminal servers will no longer acceptconnections. It is usually at this point that someone realizes they neglected to install a license server.If you know a license server is not yet installed, it’s easy to do so. Any Windows Server 2003instance can be a license server. The Terminal Server Licensing component is installed throughAdd/Remove programs. When installing a license server, discoverability is critical, so check out myarticles onLicense Server Discovery andLicense Server High Availability. Common event log entries when no license server has been installed are below:
 
Event IDSourceDescription
1008TermServiceThe terminal services licensing grace period has expired and theservice has not registered with a license server.1009TermServiceThe terminal services licensing grace period is about to expire on<date> and the service has not registered with a license server withinstalled licenses.These events indicate that the terminal server has not yet registered with a license server and thegrace period will be expiring soon (ID 1009) or has already expired (ID 1008).Be sure a license server has been installed in your environment and check that the
Terminal Server  Licensing 
service is started and set to
 Automatic
. Also make sure there is no network connectivityor routing issues between the terminal servers and the license server. If the license server is locatedon the opposite side of a firewall from the terminal servers, be sure standard RPC communication isopen between the two.Event ID 1009 may also be observed when Windows Server 2003 terminal servers are installed in per-user mode from the start, resulting in the
 LicensingGracePeriodEnded 
registry key not beingset. This key suppresses the event log entries from being logged.The fix is to add the
 LicensingGracePeriodEnded 
key on the license server.1.Locate the following registry key on the Windows Server 2003 terminal server:HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService\Parameters
2.
Add a new DWORD value named
LicensingGracePeriodEnded
with a
NULL (0)
datavalue.
 
When terminal servers are in per-user mode, the grace period has no bearing on connectivity to theevent log entries are innocuous. The above steps just suppress the messages.One last note on verifying license server installations - be sure you have the correct version of alicense server installed to support the terminal servers. Windows Server 2003 terminal serversrequire a Windows Server 2003 license server; they cannot leverage a Windows 2000 license server.
Terminal Servers Cannot Locate a License Server
Probably the most common licensing-related issue is the failure to discover the license server. Myarticle onLicense Server Discoverycovers this topic in depth, including some troubleshootingsteps, so I’ll just review the key points.When a license server cannot be contacted the following messages may be logged to the Windowsevent log:
 
Event IDSourceDescription
1000TermServiceUnable to acquire a license for user <user>, domain <domain>1004TermServiceThe terminal server cannot issue a client license.1010TermServiceThe terminal server could not locate a license server Event IDs 1000 and 1004 are logged when the terminal server attempts to allocate a CAL to adevice upon connection, but cannot locate a license server or no licenses are available. Event ID1010 is typically seen with 1004 when no license server can be contacted. The most common rootcause for these event log entries is a failure to discover the license server.
LSVIEW
License Servers must be discovered by Terminal Servers. Once located, a digital certificateexchange takes place so the terminal server can check CALs allocated to clients by the licenseserver. Discoverability is
critical
. The Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit utility LSVIEW is anadministrator’s view into the discovery process and can log key information to a text file to aid introubleshooting. When launched on a terminal server, this utility will display any license serversthat are discovered, and list the type of license server (Domain or Enterprise), as seen in
Figure 1
.
Figure 1:
LSVIEWIf no servers are displayed in LSVIEW, either the license servers are offline, or they cannot bediscovered by this terminal server.
 
Enterprise License Servers
License Servers are discovered a few different ways, depending on which mode the license server was installed. When an Enterprise License Server is installed, an Active Directory registration iscreated under the configuration container in the site to which the license server host belongs. Whenthe license server is installed, the administrator performing the installation must have theappropriate rights in AD to create the object. If not, the registration may not complete and theterminal server may not be able to discover the license server.To verify the entry was successfully created, use ADSIEDIT from the Windows Server 2003Support Tools to check for its existence in the configuration container:
 LDAP://CN=TS-Enterprise-License-Server,CN=<sitename>,CN=sites,CN=configuration, DC=<domainname>,DC=com
 Under the properties of this object, look for the
 siteServers
attribute and check the values. Thisidentifies the registered license server(s) for the Active Directory site.
Recommendations for Discoverability
For the full details on license server discovery, check out my articles on the subject, also availableon this site. To summarize, follow these suggestions to ensure your license servers are easilydiscovered:
•
Install Enterprise-mode license servers in the
same
Active Directory
domain
or 
 site
as your terminal servers to ensure they are always discovered.
•
If an Enterprise-mode license server is not possible in your environment, load the licenseservice on a domain controller where it is more likely to be discovered.
•
An easy way to ensure the license server is discovered is to leverage the
 LicenseServers
registry key located here on each terminal server:HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\TermService\Parameters\LicenseServersThis overrides the discovery process and will ensure the license server is discovered.
•
Install more than one activated license server in your environment to ensure redundancy.Finally, some additional things to check here are basic network and RPC connectivity, and be surethe license server is online and the license service is started.
License Server Security Group GPO
Windows Server 2003 introduced the ability to control which terminal servers can access a particular license server through the use of a new group policy setting – 
License Server SecurityGroup
. If you are leveraging this policy, be sure that the terminal server in question has been addedto the policy so it can access the licensing services.Also check to see if the terminal server in question
is
the license server. There is a known issue inthe new functionality where if the server that requests the license is the same machine as the licenseserver, the operation fails. A hotfix is available to correct this issue and can be obtained fromMicrosoft Product Support Services. See Microsoft KB 834803for more information.
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