Forcing Linked Clones to check live KMS servers for Activation

[MrBeatnik]

Hi all.

Apparently, linked clones will check the same KMS server that was used to activate their golden master.

(VMware View 5.0 Documentation Center) - note this is View 5 documentation, but we use View 6.1 now.

"For KMS licensing, View Composer uses the KMS server that is configured to activate the parent virtual machine."

This causes a problem if the KMS is decommissioned, or generally has a problem - all linked clones fail to activate.

How can we prevent the linked clones from using the same KMS server?

How can we get the linked clones to enumerate and pick the first KMS server returned by the DNS SRV records?

Thanks

[MrBeatnik]

I put in a support call to VMware.

I was concerned that no linked clones would be created if the KMS server (used in the master) was down.

This is true, and the linked clones will NOT look for any other active KMS server.

So, if the KMS server your master uses goes down, this is yet another point of failure for the entire system, if you are configured with linked clones.

The quickest fix, if a reboot on the KMS server is not cutting it, is to change the DNS SRV record to point to another KMS server.

If you are decommissioning a server that was used for activation in the master, you will need to re-arm on the new server, snapshot, and push out to the pools. OR reuse the DNS SRV record again.

[MrBeatnik · Accepted solution]

Update:

Top level DNS entry works great.

• We added a DNS record called kms.domain.com which uses round robin to our two KMS server.
• We made the Golder Master VM point to the record. slmgr.vbs /skms kms.domain.com:port
• We spun up some linked clones.
• Checked where the linked-clones where pointing to slmgr.vbs /dlv- both pointing to the DNS record, and not a specific server.
• Performed a second activation, and performed a packet capture at same time slmgr.vbs /ato

We found that the linked clones would go to different servers, and respond accordingly.

The same can be done with Office using the ospp.vbs (albeit different switches).