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.

[Dan_Travers]

Anthony, when the OnBase Client detects a new workstation it displays a warning message indicating that the Machine ID has changed. This message alerts the OnBase administrator that licenses registered to the previous workstation may need to be reassigned to the new workstation. In a VDI environment with non-persistent virtual workstations where a new workstation is pushed down each time the user logs in, this warning message can be disabled to prevent it from displaying on every login. Your first line of support can assist you with disabling this warning message.

There are other scenarios that can cause the warning to display, therefore I would encourage anyone else seeing this message consistently to engage your first line of support to investigate if you have not already. In general it is recommended to keep the "Detect changes to Workstation identification" setting enabled in the Workstation Registration settings in OnBase Configuration. This setting attempts to locate an existing workstation registration for the current workstation when the Machine ID changes. If an existing workstation registration is found it will be updated with the new Machine ID and any workstation-specific information such as licenses that have been registered to the workstation will be preserved. Disabling the "Detect changes to Workstation identification" setting would make it more likely that a new workstation registration is created when the Machine ID changes thereby displaying the "Machine ID has changed" warning.

[MichaelBertrand]

Dan, in your description of a possible "fix" you say that it disables the warning. Am I to understand that the underlying issue/result will still happen, i.e. a duplicate workstation?

This sort of duplicate workstation thingy is quite common in the VM world and when it happens to servers any processing tends to need to be reconfigured. It would be great if there were a stable workaround for this. 

[Dan_Travers]

Michael, this warning message can be experienced in different situations and the best approach depends on the scenario. In the case of a VDI environment with disposable virtual workstations there is not a concept of a persistent workstation so using a concurrent licensing scheme and disabling the warning message provides a solution that suits the environment. In other cases the configuration of Windows UAC (User Account Control) can lead to a situation where the "Machine ID has changed" warning message is triggered based on user permissions rather than an actual change to the workstation. Because there are different reasons the warning is displayed and every environment is different I would encourage anyone experiencing this warning message repeatedly to work with your first line of support. They can diagnose the exact cause of the warning message and implement a solution that best fits your environment.