First published on CloudBlogs on May, 01 2007
WMI Providers for administration
With Longhorn, we added support for WMI providers for Terminal Services Licensing. With the use of these WMI providers, administrators can now script tasks that were in the past available only through the UI. Some of the capabilities that the WMI providers expose would help enable support for tasks like periodically monitoring available licenses on the License Server, generating license usage reports, querying for various properties of the License Server etc.
Listed below are examples of the tasks that can be accomplished via WMI -
a) Activating, deactivating or reactivating the license server
b) Installing license key-packs
c) View details of licenses issued by the License Server
d) Generate per-user license reports
e) View configuration information of the License Server (e.g.: Is the license server installed on the Domain Controller? Is the Group Policy to prevent upgrades group enabled on the LS? Etc.)
f) Publish or un-publish the License Server in Active Directory
g) Revoke licenses
