VDI and Licensing Question

[Anthony_Garmont]

We have a Citrix VDI-In-A-Box environment setup on premise. We host around 20 desktops on it. On logoff the Virtual Desktops are destroyed and users get a fresh machine on every logon.

My question concerns licensing. We have mostly (80+) Named User licenses, with only around 3 concurrent licenses. We are seeing a prompt on our VDI users that says:

"This workstation's machine ID has changed since the last logon. Any product registrations that had been in use by this workstation may no longer be available."

We have instructed them to just accept the prompt and move on, however I was just curious if this is because we are using "Named Users" and not "Concurrent" users? Or if there was a good way of working around this?

My thought was to delete the machine logons nightly in SQL, and in SQL, I can run this query and see the logons:

SELECT * FROM sys.server_principals WHERE Name LIKE 'VDII%'

However, it is supposedly not a great idea to edit this table and it actually throws an error if you try to delete anything: ""Ad hoc updates to system catalogs are not allowed."

I imagine there are others using VDI and wondered what they are doing on this.

[Stormy_Kies4]

It is not fixed by Concurrent user licenses - and we are looking at moving to a Citrix/vdi solution as well.

We have around 130 concurrent user licenses and only a few named user clients - and we are getting this error as well.

The method Hyland uses to determine a unique machine ID reminds me of the Windows Genuine Advantage program from a few years ago where it watches for hardware changes to create a unique machine ID.  Unfortunately if any of the components that make up that number change - the machine ID changes and onbase views the pc as a new pc.  It is not a big deal - but the error:

"This workstation's machine ID has changed since the last logon. Any product registrations that had been in use by this workstation may no longer be available."

Does pop up which tends to irritate and/or scare end users, and means I need to go reapply any specialty licenses.  Granted it does not happen very often, but once we start running 800 - 1000 of these devices  - I am assuming the numbers of times we get these errors will go up as well.

Has anyone come up with a way around this yet?  Is this something that is being addressed in newer versions of onbase? 

[John_Anderson4]

In OnBase Config, under Utils -> Workstation Registration, there is a checkbox for "Detect changes to Workstation identification" - I think this may do what you need. This is available in OnBase 12 for sure, I'm not sure when it was introduced.

[Mark_Tachibana]

We have experienced the same problem in our VM environment.  We were informed that this problem is remedied in OnBase 13.  We are running the duplicate workstation cleanup script on a weekly basis with the assistance of Hyland tech service.  I'd be interested to hear from any OnBase 13 facilities to see if this problem did indeed get addressed.  Thanks.

[Stormy_Kies4]

Onbase 11 has that workstation options box, but currently all boxes are unchecked. 

It would seem to me that not having "Detect Changes to Workstation identification" would be the answer.

Unless I am supposed to check one of these boxes to get it to stop reidentifying some of these pcs.