Your terminal services temporary client license will expire in N days. Please contact your system administrator to get a permanent license

PROBLEM:

Your users are getting the following error message when connecting to a server on a domain with a Terminal Server License Server:

Your terminal services temporary client license will expire in N days. Please contact your system administrator to get a permanent license

CAUSE:

Your users are getting a 120 days temporary client license because the License Server cannot allocate a valid permanent license.

SOLUTION:

To correct this problem, change the Licensing Mode in Terminal Services Configuration to Per User. To do this, follow these steps:

1.       Logon on the Terminal Server acting as the license server.

2.       Click [Start], then click on Administrative Tools, and then click Terminal Services Configuration.

3.       Click Server Settings, and then double-click Licensing (or Licensing Mode).

4.       Change the Licensing to Per User, and then click OK (Fig 2).

5.       Finally run gpupdate

Fig 2

OBSERVATIONS:

When observing the Terminal Server Licensing windows you can see that all the licenses assigned are going to the Temporary Licenses pool (see Fig 3).

Fig 3

Fig 4

A temporary license creates this entry at the user workstation:       HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\MSLicensing

A valid permanent license doesn’t create this entry. To verify that your users are been assigned a permanent license delete the MSLicensing entry from the registry (see note below about registry changes).

Deleting the MSLicensing entry will reset the Terminal Server Licensing to another 120 days license.