Does anyone have any idea how MS KMS licensing works in a pure VDI environment?
An example of what I'm talking about:
1000 Virtual machines running Vista Enterprise on 20 ESX hosts.
No physical Vista machines
The licencing is VECD so it's all kosher
The activation is via MS KMS because it's a secure environment with no direct Internet access for activation.
On the surface this is OK, however the KMS server requires a minimum of 25 physical vista clients to be waiting for activation before it will activate anything. After a week if a client hasn't re-activated the count is decremented by one (conversely if a physical vista client activates, the count is incremented by one).
The problem is that although virtual instances of vista are activated correctly by KMS (as long as the KMS vista count is at least 25), the virtual vista instances have a count of 0, which means that unless there are at least 25 physical vista clients online continuously, KMS stops working.
The obvous answer would be to not use vista but use XP with a VLK, however the requirement is for vista only.
The way I see it, there are 2 ways of fixing this in a pure VDI environment:
-Fix KMS so that it counts VMs
-Trick the Vista VM into believing that it's a physical machine
The most likely option is to trick the VM, but I'm not sure how it knows this? Is it by the MAC address? or by the existance of VMware tools? By the VMware hardware devices? A combination of factors?
Has anyone done this before?
