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How To Prevent Windows Re-Activation During Annual Recovery?

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After recovering windows to a virtual machine, certain servers prompt to re-activate. What is needed to prevent the need to re-activate? I’d like to comply with any rules MS sets forth.

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Clarifications

In reply to How To Prevent Windows Re-Activation During Annual Recovery?

Clarifications

You should recover to a point

In reply to How To Prevent Windows Re-Activation During Annual Recovery?

After Windows was Activated not before.

There is no other way to prevent Reactivation Requirements of any Windows Platform.

Col

Hardware Changes

In reply to How To Prevent Windows Re-Activation During Annual Recovery?

In addition to creating your backup after activation has been performed, you can generate an activation event if the hardware has changed since you made the backup image.

Simple things like the hard drive serial number, CPU serial number, amount of installed RAM, and most especially, the MAC address all count toward an activation event. Change any one of them and Windows just accepts the new configuration. Change 3 or more at once (the MAC address counts as 2 votes) and you have an activation event.

The only true way to prevent an activation event is to be using the corporate license version of Windows.

Chas

open agreement

In reply to How To Prevent Windows Re-Activation During Annual Recovery?

@OHSmeg – the servers are backed up nightly. the restores use backup sets that are created after windows was activated.

Like Chas says though because the hardware changes so much, its prompting to reactivate.

I remember buying these licenses on a open agreement. I’m not sure what you mean by corporate license. I’ve heard of retail, oem, and volume licenses before. Does corporate = volume? I’m almost sure these are volume licenses on a open agreement.

Reponse To Answer

In reply to open agreement

Microsoft License terms include:
Retail (very few users have a retail icense)
OEM (most home and small business computers have some version of an OEM license)
Open (for businesses with 5 or more systems)
Volume (for business with 250 or more systems and the ability to forecast requirements)
Enterprise (for very large companies with long term forecasting)

What I was thinking about was the Enterprise license. But, the base Microsoft documentation states that MS stores the license information on their servers. Thus, a hardware initiated activation event will likely still require activation after a restore.

In theory, one can save and separately restore the activation files after the refresh. I don’t have a link right now, but there were articles on how to backup your activation files.

Chas

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