On Wednesday, December 21, 2016 2:27:05 PM EST Nicolas Ecarnot wrote:
Hello,
Most of our virtual machines are Linux, but an increasing number of windows VMs are being integrated into our oVirt DCs.
We bought tons of windows server licences, and successfully activated them.
Due to how Windows Product Activation is working, when a windows VM is migrating from a host to another, this product activation is reset, launching a 30 days countdown to auto-shutdown.
According to this old page :
https://mazimi.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/getting-around-windows-activation-wh en-virtualizing/
and what I can read in microsoft's 2012 server documentations, I then can re-activate it twice during the next 90 days.
Assuming I *want* to have *no* control upon the location of the VMs amongst their hosts (I want them to fly freely, confident in the lovely auto-balance scheduler), I understand all this is not the way to go.
At present, we have 2003, 2008 and 2012 server editions. the only things I can read about windows 2012 server is related to the commercial aspects (standard licence = 2 VMs, datacenter licencce = infinite # of VMs), but not about this Windows Product Activation trouble.
How do you deal with this? Is there a special licence type or something dedicated that would prevent such an uncomfortable situation? (Christmas is near, I favor soft terms.)
Regards.
Nicolas, IIRC this is what the custom serial number setting is for. As far as I know what happens when you migrate is that some id that windows looks for is changed (because it is generate based on an id at the host level). You can set a custom single value regardless of which host the VM is running on by opening up the edit virtual machine in the UI, then clicking system, at the bottom there is a check box called 'Provide custom serial number policy'. Then you can select VM ID. Once you have done that, if I understand the feature correctly, the ID won't change and windows will not think you have new hardware each time the VM migrates. I could be wrong, but I believe this is what you are looking for.