I’ve seen a problem on a few servers, where they have been fully configured to use a licence server with available CALs, but after a time still report that there are no licence servers available to use. The servers had been configured to talk to the licence server by following the process Microsoft document at the link below;
Everything appears to check out, and I know the licence server is being used by other Server 2012 R2 servers for their CALs, so I know essentially the licence server is working. The server appeared to just not be using the licence server details I’d given it and simply falling over when the grace period ran out.
The solution was found in the registry, with the following key;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod
After removing the binary value in there and only leaving the default string and rebooting the server, the servers would check in to the licence server. I had to take control of the registry key to make this happen, and then revert the permissions back after I’d finished.
Some people have reporting seeing event ID’s 1129 and 1130 in the TerminalServices-RemoteConnectionManager event log, but I didn’t see these in all cases.