Richard J Green

License Types with Automatic Virtual Machine Activation

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an article on how to use Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA) with Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V. I wanted to follow this up with a brief note on license types Microsoft provide and how they seem to work with AVMA.

In production environments you will be using keys purchased through either a Select, Volume License or other commercial agreement and in test and development, you may well be using keys from MSDN or TechNet according to how you operate.

It appears through some testing I did that AVMA only works with operating system media and license keys obtained through volume license channels and that for operating system source media downloaded from TechNet or MSDN that the AVMA client key will not be accepted as a valid one. This is especially worth noting if you are using VMM to automate the deployment of a virtual machine onto Hyper-V as the result will be that steps in the VMM virtual machine creation process will fail after the Customizing Virtual Machine phase. Connecting to the newly spawned VM with either the Connect via Console option in VMM or from Hyper-V Manager will reveal the machine is stuck at the license key entry step of the operating system OOBE process.

If you are using a single VMM instance to manage your production and testing and development clouds and guest workloads and you plan on using AVMA for virtual machine activation that you will need to have provisioned separate virtual machine templates and Guest OS Profiles in your VMM library for your various environments using the respective media from TechNet, MSDN or volume license to be able to properly compete an automated VMM virtual machine deployment.

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