Another suggested that the customer use other MAK B keys they had to license the VMs. One suggested I just re-build everything as Datacenter edition, but I couldn’t do that since customer had already spent a bunch of time installing their applications. Unfortunately the first two support folks did not understand the challenge I was in, MAK C key with MAK B needs. So my challenge was how to deal with this promise of unlimited Windows OSEs when the only key Microsoft gives you is the MAK C? After reading every Blog, forum, case note and whitepaper I could find I called Microsoft Volume Licensing Support. If you attempt to activate the Windows Standard and Enterprise editions with the MAK C key you will get a notification that key is not correct for the edition of windows. See the Microsoft Whitepaper “How to Choose the Right Volume License Key for Windows ( )” To successfully activate the Windows 2008 R2 Standard and Enterprise editions we would need a separate MAK B key. For those of you who are new to licensing, a Windows Server 2008 R2 MAK C key is only good for activating Window Server 2008 R2 Datacenter & Itanium Editions.
The problem started when we realized that we had Windows 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter edition virtual machines but had only received a Multiple Activation Key (MAK) Product Group C or MAK C key from Microsoft.
So the project was going great until we had to start licensing and activating the Windows Server virtual machines the customer had created on the new environment. The goal of this licensing approach is to allow the customer to run and “unlimited” number of Windows Operating System Environments in a virtual environment.
Recently I came across my first project where the customer was a Microsoft Volume Licensing customer and had purchased Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter processor licensing for their new VMware vSphere implementation.
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