I'm trying to help a company out, which has been told by one of their software providers that they should use terminal services in order to allow employees in two different office locations to use the software. I'm trying to wrap my head around the licensing...

First, they need a server license, that's a given. They'd need a new server, so we'll say 2008 R2. The CALs are where I'm a bit fuzzy - it seems that RDS CALs are different from regular CALs - is that correct?

If so, then for one of their employees to run an application residing on the server, do they need both a regular CAL *and* an RDS CAL?

If you guys could point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it.

Maybe this can help you out: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/client-licensing.aspx

EDIT:

Welcome to THE forums too

It seems you can find RDS CAL's (5-packs) for about $400 or less. Read this article from MSDN Team Blog

And as usual, if you want to be able to Terminal Serve, you need RDS cal's in addition to any other cal's. Nothing has changed.

each user in this casse would need to 2 CAL's

1. the normal user CAL that allows connections to servers (Ad logon, httpp etc)

2. the RDP CAL to connect to the terminal server and use the application from there.

Also, watch out for the app in question - some apps need to be licensed differently to be run on a TS (like MS Office as an example).

Thanks for the replies. I'll let them know that they need the RDS cals in addition to regular CALs.

The software in question is some insurance software, for some reason they don't want to put another server in the second office, and the software vendor recommended terminal services. No licensing issues with the software.

Now to look into bandwidth issues between the offices... each office has something like 512mbps, I need to get prices on more substantial pipes.