Anilrgowda

Question: How do CALs work? Specifically:

Is there a time limit, as in, do you have to renew CAL's every year or once you buy 25 CALs those 25 are good on that server forever?

What do CAL's cover? What is considered a USER? Is a user just each user account created on the system? For example; if there are 25 user accounts on the system then I need 25 CAL's. But if I am running a file server and allowing anonymous local connections then do I need X number of CALs for all the anonymous connections?

What if I have the server running DHCP. Does each workstation recieveing its IP info via DHCP from the server count as a USER?

Anilrgowda

A Windows CAL covers Windows.
An Exchange CAL covers Exchange. Windows CALs do not cover Exchange access.

Windows and Exchange CALs are not hard enforced.

Terminal Services CALs and CALs from SBS are enforced, because of the way that the technology is designed. If the SBS CALs were not hard enforced for example, then the 75 user limit could be abused.

Anonymous access doesn't require CALs as the user isn't logging in. However if the user logs in then you need to have CALs, but there are other licensing schemes available for web based services.
However if you are running a web server then you should look at web edition of Windows 2003 which is designed for the job.

When it comes to counting CALs, I use the lower of the number of workstations and servers or the number of users. Number of users is known as per seat, number of machines is known as per device.

With Terminal Services, you need to have Windows 2003 server CALs and Terminal Services CALs.
For Exchange you also need to have both Windows 2003 server CALs and Exchange CALs.

With Exchange up to 2003 the CAL also gives you a license for Outlook. That has been removed with Exchange 2007 CALs.