Client Management Suite

If I have 3000 users/devices that needs to be managed, 1 notification sever, 4 site servers, 1 SQL server, how many license of SQL CAL do I need?  

One SQL server license, 5 SQL CAL license?

One SQL server license? 1000 SQL CAL license?

I am thinking that since the client device does not contact the SQL server directly and only the notification or site servers contact SQL? It would 5 SQL CAL License?  Otherwise it gets very expensive!

If you check with Microsoft, I believe you'll find that you'll need 3000 CALs.

Altiris is middleware.  It communicates data from the endpoints (in your case, 3,000 of them) to the SQL database.  The endpoints are users of the database, not your 1 Notification Server, so you need 3,000 device CALs.

There are three ways to do this:

1. Device CALs: You have 3,000 devices and 5,000 employees.  3,000 work on these 3,000 computers 9a-5p, 1,500 work 5p-1a, and 500 work on them 1a-9a.  You have fewer devices than users, so you buy device CALs.
2. User CALs: You have 3,000 devices and 2,250 employees.  A handful of employees have laptops and mobile devices in addition to their desktops at work.  You have fewer users than devices, so you buy 2,250 user CALs.
3. CPU license: Buy a license per CPU used by SQL.  Devices and users do not matter.  You can add solutions and grow without worrying.  Often less expensive than user or device CALs and very easy to enforce.

We recommend CPU licenses for all of our customers.