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Windows Licensing and Virtual Machines

F

FrozenFood

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 19, 2002
Messages
397
Hi guies,

because of my work and now self-employment, It makes sense to me to use virtual machines. The software I use has now been upgraded (Siemens software) and now it will only work with Windows 7. I have a Windows 7 retail licence, but If I make an activated copy and clone it, will I have to buy more licence keys? or can I keep it offline and it wont phone home again?
 
While it will work..... you still need to have one license per running copy of Windows, especially when doing so for work / self-employed.
 
So I need buy 5 copies of windows 10 when it comes out? Oh well. I don't want to get into a multiple licence agreement, so this would be better to keep them at arms length

I can see why WindowsXP is still popular. In a virtual machine I will keep it indefinitely for legacy virtual machines.
 
Just buy datacenter licenses for all your hosts and you're good with unlimited anything guests. :)
 
Brahmzy said:
Just buy datacenter licenses for all your hosts and you're good with unlimited anything guests. :)
Click to expand...

I would think its cheaper to spend £82 x 10, than subscribe to a Microsoft licence with audits and penalties.
 
When activating VM's on Hyper-V, you don't use the host key. That'll ding you for another install of that license. Instead, want to use the AVMA (Automatic Virtual Machine Licensing) key. To convert over to an AVMA key, just use:

slmgr.vbs /ipk <avma product key>

Once that is done, restart the machine. You should then be able to do a:

slmvr.vbs /dlv

And you'll see that it's using VIRTUAL MACHINE licensing.

You can also use the AVMA keys to do your install, too. Then the initial activation will be done through the hypervisor. You can read more about it, as well as get the AVMA keys, here.

Cyclone3d said:
The only real downside I saw was that when the server running Hyper-V needs to reboot due to updates, it of course takes all the VMs down during the reboot.

Now if you have HA set up, that shouldn't be a problem as it will just auto fail over to the another server without interrupting the users.
Click to expand...

Isn't that true of any hypervisor? If you need maintenance, it's got to come down unless you have an HA setup.


I'm a big fan of hyper-v. I have a large hyper-v cluster hosting about 400VMs and it runs pretty damn good. With that said, if you're new to the game, you should make sure that you learn VMWare. While Hyper-V has gained a lot of ground in the past few years, you'd have to be blind to see that VMWare isn't what most companies use.



I have an idea for your lab --

Microsoft actually gives Hyper-V away for free. It doesn't come with any lienses. You can get it here. On that page, you can also get all the Windows server downloads as evals. You can then use Server Hyper-V to host VMs running 180day evals. If you're truely just labbing things up, 180days is a good amount of time (and you should be able to re-arm them for some more time, too).

I don't really know if VMWare has a similar solution, but if they did, you could use the same evals to do your lab.
 
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