To run a session against a ThinLinc cluster, the server must be equipped with license files. The license files specify the number of concurrent users the cluster is allowed to run.

If no license files are installed on the cluster, a maximum of five concurrent users are allowed.

Each cluster can have one or several license files. Each file contains licenses for a specific number of concurrent users. When the VSM Server starts up, it reads all license files and creates a sum of the number of concurrent users allowed based on the licenses from all files.

License files have one soft and one hard limit. When the soft limit is reached, new sessions can still be started, but a license violation will be logged and sent to the administrator (see Section 4.4, “ Log Files and E-mail Messages ”). If however the hard limit has been reached, new sessions cannot be started. The purpose of this system is to allow growing organisations some time to adapt the number of licenses to a growing number of concurrent sessions, avoiding loss of production.