I'm going to admit right now I'm new to the world of professional IT workers, most of my experience prior to this was end-user, not server.

What exactly are CAL's for Windows Server Products? Are they tied in to how many computers I have accessing that particular server or set of servers, are they tied into how many people I have access that server or what?

For example the school I work at has an enrollment of 575 with 54 staff and has approx 200 computers (including 7 servers), does that mean I need 193 or 600+ CALs?

CAL stands for Client Access License, they can be chosen either by user or by device. So say you have a server that has a 10 user cal, only 10 users can be connected at any one time. So if all 200 computer could be connected to the server at one time, you would need 200 licenses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_Access_License

and

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/lic_cal.mspx

Does that help?

This post has been edited by Gravity Gripp: Dec 6 2007, 03:06 PM

It starts to help, but I have a few more questions I didn't see there.

1. Is there a listing in the server that would tell me how many CALs and type (device/users) that I have? Or am I going to have to sort through all my paperwork to see if I can find out how many CALs I have?

2. Do I have to have a separate set of CALs for each server I'm running?

This post has been edited by fstech: Dec 6 2007, 03:12 PM

1) I'm not sure actually. You probably should look on the paper work just to know how many you actually have. Each Windows server comes with 5 built-in.
2) I believe so.

unless you set up the licensing services on your server (don't do that) then the OS doesn't track licensing...it's all documented licenses



for the second part..i've NEVER gotten a straight answer on licensing yet....though per user or per device CALs refer to "simultaneous" connections.....so if you've got 200 users....but you've got 2 shifts..and only 100 users are there at any given time...then you'd only need 100 CALs to be in the clear...since only 100 users will simultaneously be connecting at once (in theory)....i've never been sure if you need cals for each server on your network though...i know you need seperate CALs for each exchange mailbox that you have if you've got an exchange server....and i know you need sql licenses per user with sql...