In this video from ITFreeTraining I will be looking at client access licenses for Windows
Server 2012, otherwise known as Cals. This video will go through the 3 different Cals
available in Windows Server 2012 and which ones you will need to purchase to meet the
needs of your organization. Before I go into the different types of Cals,
I will first look at what is a Cal? A Cal is a Client Access License required by a user
or device to access Windows Server. For example, if you had a user that was accessing a file
share or usinf printing services on a Windows Server, this user would require a Cal in order to
access that server. This does not include unauthenticated internet
access. For example, if you had a web site running on a server and a user was accessing
pages on that web site anonymously, then a Cal would not be required. It should be pointed
out, that if you are using a non-Microsoft system to authenticate users before they access the web site,
you would need to purchase a Cal for each user or device that is accessing the web site
Depending on how you are accessing Windows Server 2012 there are 3 different types of
Cals available. These are User, Device and Remote Desktop Services Cals. If you are accessing
the file server for general use, for example for file and printing like services, you need
to use a user or device Cal. In a moment we will see the difference between the two.
The Remote Desktop Services Cal is only used if you are planning to access the Windows
Server using remote desktop services. In a moment I will cover how Remote Desktop Service
Cal it is different from the user or device Cal license, but first I will have a closer
look at the user cal. A user Cal follows the user and thus they
can use it to login into any computer on the network and then access any Windows Server
that they wish. In this example, a single user has a desktop and a device in which they
use to access two different servers. Since the same user is accessing both devices, only
one Cal is required. A user Cal is normally used when a single
user is using multiple devices. If I add another 2 devices and another user, notice the first
user can use the desktop as well as the new user. This means for this network, 2 User
CAL licenses are required. User Cals are a good choice when you have more devices than
users, but in some cases this may not be the case. For example if you have more users than
devices. When this occurs, you will want to look at device Cals
In this example, there are multiple users that are using the same computer or device
to access Windows file servers. In this case, if you were to purchase User Cals you would
need 6 users Cals. If you instead use device Cals, only 3 device Cals would be required.
You can see that in this case it is cheaper to use device Cals rather than user Cals.
The last type of Cal is Remote Desktop Services Cal. This Cal is also referred to an additive
Cal since it adds features. If you use other software from Microsoft like SQL Server and
Exchange, you will need to purchase Cals for that software in order to use it features.
Remote Desktop Service Cals are different from user and device Cals in that they need
to be activated before they can be used. Although user and device Cals are required to access
Windows Servers, the Cals themselves do not need to be activated and the use of them is
not enforced. It is up to the administrator to make sure they have the required user and
device Cals and thus are compliant. Remote Desktop Services Cal�s come in 3
different types. These are, User, Device and External Connector. The device Cal allows
a single device to connect to remote desktop services by any user. A User Cal permits one
user using any device to connect up to Remote Desktop services. The external connector is
used to access a single remote desktop server by multiple external users. It is used when
your company wants to allow a 3rd party, for example an external contractor that works
with your company, to connect to remote desktop services.
The last point I want to cover in this video is that new Cals can be used with older operating
systems. For this reason you should always buy the latest OS CALs if you have the choice.
For example, if you do not have a single Windows Server 2012 server on your network, there
is no reason that you cannot purchase Windows Server 2012 CALs. These will work fine with
any edition of Windows Server 2008 or previous operating system. However, if you were to
purchase Windows Server 2008 CALs, these would need to upgraded to Windows Server 2012 CALs
before your clients could start using Windows Server 2012 on your network.
This covers the basics of how Cals work in Windows. An important topic to understand
to make sure that your network is compliant. If you have enjoyed this video, please feel
free to subscribe. All our videos are free and available on YouTube.
Thanks for watching and I hope to see you again in the next video.