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winstontj
Contributor
Contributor

Windows 7 licence - Reactivate when migrated?

Hello,

Is there a way to keep a W7x64 (professional) activated as a VM? I'm having trouble with it constantly needing to be reactivated. Its not a big deal - its a legit key (MSDN) but the problem is I've been activating so many that I had to call up MSDN and get my activation key extended and explain myself.

This is kindof annoying and I'd like it to stop.

If I create a VM of W7x64 Pro and activate it and then eitehr migrate it to a different machine, back it up and restore it on the same machine, try to go to an earlier snapshot version, etc. it always deactivates.

My production environment doesn't use Microsoft Volume Licensing (each machine is activated individually since we have only a few machines) so this constant deactivation will be unacceptable in a full production environment.

I need to know that in the event of a hardware failure I can migrate a VM over to another machine and not interrupt the end-user experience.

Any ideas? I'm trying to use the search function but I'm not sure exactly what to search for.

(this is also an issue with Office 2010 btw)

Thx.

EDIT: Also, when using vCenter Converter Standalone and converting physical desktops that auto-activate (Like Dell & HP do via their OEM OS DVD) I'm finding that the converted VM deactivates. I have a small group of 5-6 machines I need to convert and carry over from desktops to VM's - its not really *that* big of a deal since I have the COA stickers for each machine however I am trying to avoid any interruption of the end-user experience. I'd like to convert the PC over to a VM image, load it up on a host and give the end-user a new IP address.

Is there any way to avoid having to log into the new VM and physiclly re-authenticate Windows?

Not only is this aggrevating but in these cases (with COA sticker) they can only be activated so many times so I can't just burn through activations while I experiment.

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