Visual Studio community 2017 activation - virtual box

[PureMatt]

Hi all,

 

we've just deployed vbox coding environment to a bunch of IT rooms with VS community 2017 installed on the base image. Our vbox environment is locked down, with no network card attached and therefore no internet connection. It only allows students access to their home directly via a mapped drive from the PC vbox is running on. Our vbox image also has an immutable disk, so each reboot it resets to it's fresh build status. i was hoping this was going to save us from the activation count down, but because VS uses a fixed date (30 days after the initial install) it continues to count down and on further investigation it checks out to the internet every 12 hours.

 

the way it's supposed to be activated is with a free sign up from the student, upon logging in with their account it will then activate the product and continually check every 12 hours. so presumably even if i alter the base image by activating VS with a dummy account before making it immutable, it will still deactivate itself?

 

Any advice/help would be much appreciated.

 

Cheers,

 

Matt

Edited October 26, 2018 by PureMatt