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Windows 7 Enterprise KMS Activation with Virtual Machines

Answered Windows 7 Enterprise KMS Activation with Virtual Machines

  • Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:19 PM
     
     
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    I'm missing something with Windows 7 Enterprise KMS licensing and I'm having a tough time finding out what I'm missing.

    I started by using a Windows 2008 R2 machine as a KMS Host but kept getting errors when running /slmgr.vbs <KMS-Key> so now I have it on a Windows 7 Enterprise machine.  There were too many conflicting responses and articles about whether a Server 2008 R2 can activate client keys or not, so I just decided to use a Win7 machine for it.

    So for clarification, my KMS setup is this -- Windows 7 Enterprise virtual machine as a KMS Host.  DNS is configured per all of the technet specifications.  I've used my valid KMS product key on my host and received the "successfully installed product key" message.  I then ran /slmgr.vbs ato on the host and got it to successfully activate.

    The trouble now is that my KMS Clients are not activating, and this may be what I'm missing.

    I'm using VMware virtual machine's for my clients.  They're not linked clones or anything, they're full VM's.  However, I built one VM and then cloned it 25-times (so it's not a composed image, they're separate machines).  It appears that the internal computer GUID's are different, but my KMS Count is at 7.  I have no idea how to tell what 7 machines have reported that they're one step away from activation.  When I try to activate the 25 machines using VAMT it keeps saying that the threshold count has not been reached.

    I know this KMS setup is supposed to be easy, and in theory it is (it was very easy to install VAMT and run the slmgr.vbs command to install and activate the key), but when some strange activation issue like this happens there seems to be very little troubleshooting information.  Would love some assistance to figure out what I'm doing wrong, thanks!



    • Edited by RickO- Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:20 PM
    • Edited by RickO- Wednesday, February 13, 2013 5:20 PM
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  • Thursday, February 14, 2013 6:30 PM
     
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    Solved my own problem.  Turns out even though I cloned the VM's they still needed the "sysprep /generalize" command to be run on all of them.  This fixed the issue and now am able to activate my Windows 7 Linked-Clones.
    • Marked As Answer by RickO- Thursday, February 14, 2013 6:31 PM
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  • Thursday, February 14, 2013 8:44 PM
     
     
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    it sounds like you cloned the original VM *after* it had already activated to your KMShost, so you cloned the CMID and all your VM's were presenting to your KMShost with the same (duplicate) CMID.

    sysprep generalise will fix that, although there are less painful ways..

    and your issue with establishing your KMShost is probably that you were using the Win7 KMShost product key on your WS2008R2 box, which isn't valid.
    The KMShost product key must match the OS of the box you are using as KMShost - it does not match the OS of the clients you wish to activate.

    KMShosts which run on WS2008R2 are capable of activating Server OS KMSclients and Client OS KMSclients.

    Don
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