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donomeister
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Portability vs. Windows Activation

For many years now I've kept my VM Guests on a portable drive. Occasionally when I need more oomph, I power down and move the drive from my laptop to my desktop which also has VMWare licensed on it. This has worked beautifully and certainly shows the benefits of using VM's. I love the ability to travel with all my VMs, but come home to a more powerful host computer to run them on.

Yesterday I purchased a new desktop and upgraded the new Desktop and old Laptop VMWare licenses from 5.5 to 6.5. This morning I started converting guest VMs. Logging onto the first converted VM, I had my first 'oh crap' moment: WinXP wanted me to reactivate the OS because of significant hardware changes. To be clear, the new machine is certainly a big step up from my desktop:

  • Host Laptop: Intel 2GHz (single core) / 2GB RAM

  • Old Host Desktop: Intel 2.5GHz Dual Core / 4GB RAM (to be wiped and sold)

  • New Host Desktop: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.67 GHz / 6GB RAM

I have legitimate licenses for each VM so I'm not worried about reactivating--MS doesn't mind seeing an activation every year or so. What concerns me is that I won't be able to move between my lowly laptop and my new high-powered desktop without being prompted to reactivate each time.

I believe I am using my individually purchased XP licenses legally. How do other users move freely between hosts of varying specs without reactivating each time?

Thank you,

Dono.

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ksc
VMware Employee
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Excellent idea, magic-man.

To fill in one more detail, the ethernet addresses (which are quite possibly the cause of re-activation, as they are one of few things with serial numbers) are generated directly from UUID.bios during power-on. Setting the keep action will also ensure the generated address does not change.

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magic-man
Hot Shot
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I have found activation to be contollable once you understand that it takes the sum of changes made (scores them) and turns on activation if the scores grt too high at once.

If you are going to ruin the VM on an intel box and an AMD box, first set the UUID and MAC address as described above. Then fire it up on each box. Then you can add the CDROM drives, upgrade tools, etc... Just don't do too many changes at once...

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UT123
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I made the changes magic-man suggested in the .vmx machine and it seems to work great. Only problem I see is that Norton's Internet Seurity 2009 Suite is getting disabled and requires re-ativation. Anyone know a way around this?

I wanted to add that the original VMConverter file worked perfectly without de-activating, but when I try it on my other computer it asks to be re-activated.

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