Windows 7 CAL requirements
My company will be rolling Windows 7 out to all of our workstations and a handful of backup computers later this year, for a total of about 70 installations. We will need each device to connect to two Server 2003 file servers, an Exchange 2007 server,
an SQL 2005 server, a XenApp server, and a Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 server. From what I've been able to find so far, we'll need to purchase Core CAL Suites and separate SQL CALs for each of these devices, but is this overkill? Or would it result in
under-licensed computers?
It's nearly impossible to find out all of the licensing needs for any given environment without consulting a licensing expert due to Microsoft's insistence in making both the information available and the licensing requirements themselvs both complicated
and convoluted. There seem to be several tools that are supposed to help with determining what the requirements are, but they always seem to provide too little information or to be too vague to give a feeling of confidence in the answers provided. Does Microsoft
do this intentionally so that companies are forced to over-license? Sorry for the rant, but we've been fighting with the licensing issues for Microsoft products for a year or more and every time we think we're closing in on a solid answer, we find another
source of conflicting information.
April 30th, 2010 7:57pm