A couple of days ago, while reviewing some of the blog posts here, I happened to read Sid’s post regarding Citrix’s new per device or per user licensing model for XenDesktop 4. That led, in a somewhat convoluted way, to this post, which will focus on how you would implement this new model.

Even though I already knew some of the changes that were being incorporated into this licensing model, as soon as I read his post I immediately asked myself how, exactly, from a technical standpoint that was going to work? You see, at that exact point in time I was actively working on upgrading our XenDesktop (XD) and Provisioning Server (PVS) lab to XD4 and PVS5.1 sp1, so this topic really interested me – for the simple reason that what Citrix says is supposed to happen was not what I was seeing in my lab. At that point I was already running XenDesktop 4.0 in my lab, and I’d done nothing to put any per user or per devices licenses in place (I do however still have my previous XD Platinum Licenses from my XD 3.0 build on my 11.6.1 license server), but everything worked and I was not getting any license errors. Strange, you say? I agree!

So, like any curious tech, I started what turned out to be a long and exhaustive search for information regarding how the new license model should be implemented. But after a few hours, and a few emails between Sid and I, I had unfortunately turned up nothing, zilch, nada! In fact, the only thing I could find from Citrix – and this is pretty much common knowledge at this point because lots of people have already blogged on the topic – is the set of XenDesktop 4 documents located in the new Citrix eDocs Library. However, if you actually plow through the XenDesktop 4 documents, you will discover that there is no information on how, from a technical standpoint, this new license model is supposed to be implemented.

During my search I did run across one (yes, only one) blog post which had some insight regarding how it will actually work. That blog post was by Helge Klein of Sepago, a Citrix partner in Cologne, Germany. In that post, Helge states, “If what I have been told is true, the current version of XenDesktop 4 has no licensing enforcement built in.” (emphasis added) Now that statement really got me interested, because that was consistent with what I was actually seeing in my lab, but could it really be true?

Again, my curiosity required that I had to verify this information one way or the other. So today I picked up the phone, called the Citrix XenDesktop support team, and asked, “How does it work?” The initial answer (which I actually expected and would have bet money on) was, “I don’t know!”

To the credit of the Citrix technical support person I had on the phone, he did not just let this drop. Rather, he kept digging and reviewing information until he finally turned up an “internal only” document – which, of course, he could not share with me. However, based upon what he was reading in that document, his answer – specifically regarding the named user model – was that any user who is supposed to be assigned a license will need to be placed into the OU that was created during the install of the Desktop Delivery Controller (DDC). My reaction was, “What? You guys are going to require a business to move their users from their current OU(s), which may have group policies being applied, and place them into the XD OU? That’s crazy, because businesses, especially larger enterprises, are going to laugh at us!” Then I asked, “Can we at least nest the OUs to maintain GPO and AD structure?” to which the answer again was, “I don’t know.”

Once again, to the credit of the Citrix support person, I was asked to hold and give him a few minutes so that he could go talk to the escalation team and get a definitive answer. When he returned he confirmed what he had told me about how it was supposed to work…however, he also confirmed that today in XenDesktop 4.0 there is no license enforcement mechanism coded into the product. Basically, the license enforcement is based upon the honor system and what is written in the EULA.

That’s not necessarily bad – it’s worked reasonably well for Microsoft for many years. And our experience over the years has been that nearly all businesses want to be legally licensed, and will comply with license requirements as long as (1) they understand what constitutes compliance (which hasn’t always been easy), and (2) they don’t feel like they’re being ripped off. But it’s certainly a bit unexpected, to say the least.

So, finally, I had the answer directly from the Citrix XenDesktop support team regarding how it is implemented, which left only one more question: When will license enforcement be implemented? The answer: “I don’t know!” So, until Citrix decides to shed some light on this for us, we’ll just live with EULA-enforced licensing.

One last thought: With all due respect, wouldn’t you think that Citrix would want to tell their own internal support people the details about something like this BEFORE the product actually launches? Maybe they didn’t want the world to know about the lack of license enforcement – but things like that always come out…it’s just a matter of time. (Pssst! Hey, Citrix – it’s not a secret anymore!)