We have an appliance product that uses Virtual Machines as processing units.
These processing units are created and destroyed on demand as the configuration of the host appliance changes.
Some of these processing units are Windows Storage Server 2003 VMs that are instantiated from a template created using sysprep and a pre-installation product key.
We assign sufficient "real" Windows licenses to the appliance such that all running Windows instances can be licensed; activation is supposed to be automated.
However, we have problem that if a VM is destroyed and then re-created the license key is rejected by Microsoft when activation is attempted - MS claims that it has already been used too many times (once).
As the activation process is hidden and transparent to our customers, doing the activation via phone is not an option.
We use VMware Server as our virtualisation system platform.
=> how can we control our process such that re-activation works automatically?
Do we need to use the SLP programme? If so, does anyone have any experience with using SLP with VMware Virtual Machines? Is it possible?
NOTE: we do not want to cheat Microsoft - we will ensure that our appliances have a Windows license for each instantiated VM.
Any tips gratefully accepted. Chris.
Changed typeCarl-SThursday, October 2, 2008 3:10 PM
Changed typeCarl-SThursday, October 2, 2008 3:11 PM
Changed typeCarl-SThursday, October 2, 2008 3:11 PM
