Windows licensing newbie..

[rossibIT]

Hi Guys,

 

Last Friday we noticed that our servers were not activated. The KMS key that was originally in there is now not working! Due to my line manager being off this week he tasked me with sorting this out by contacting our supplier (Softcat) and asking them what is happening. We did have problems with renewing our active agreement with a name change for the school but that seemed to be all working fine.

 

I have contacted Softcat (who have been very helpful) and they have said that because we have an "Open Agreement" KMS keys are no longer "Pre Assigned" and MAK keys are the preferred method for activation.

 

So as a newbie to getting my hands dirty with licensing is it a case of using a MAK key on every server that needs activating? Is this the way forward? I have learnt a little bit of licensing over the last week or so and was told that KMS keys should be used as its just more "cleaner" way of activating.

 

Many thanks for your input

[SHimmer45]

MAK keys would need to be installed on servers

KMS would be "cleaner" as you would only have to change one license key on the KMS server which would activate all the others

[LeMarchand]

Softcat are right about MS preferring MAK keys these days. It's possible to contact them and hassle them for KMS keys, but IIRC they don't make it easy to find the deets.

 

How do you deploy the KMS keys? If you have VAMT set up, you could probably use that to deploy MAK keys to the servers. Depends how many you need to deploy, I guess.

[RLR]

We've never used MAK keys. Always used KMS and rarely have any issues. With newer versions of windows you usually have to contact Microsoft support and hope you speak to someone that knows what a KMS key is and they should put you through to the correct department. They will then ask a couple of questions and provide a KMS key in MVLC. I used this page before to contact someone about licensing: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/contact-us

 

Some other things worth noting that I have in my documentation:

Activating devices by KMS won’t work until there’s been enough requests to the KMS server for that product. For example, you need 5 requests made to the KMS server for it to start activating devices via KMS. So if you are trying to activate 1 or 2 devices of the same product (server 2022 for example), it won’t work until there are at least 5 of these making the request. You can view the current request amount on the KMS server by running: "slmgr /dli" in command prompt

[jthompson]

I think the "pre-assigned" terminology cited in the OP is basically saying that you'll need to ring up MS support and request that a KMS key is made available for you. That's certainly what I had to do to obtain our current Server 2019 KMS key.

 

As already mentioned, there is a threshold of activation requests that needs to be met before a KMS server will actually begin handing out activations. That's not the case if you're using the newer Active Directory based activation (ADBA), which is the successor to KMS server and is far simpler imho. It's still based on having a KMS key to use, however, so I don't think KMS keys are on the way out - it's just Microsoft requiring you to jump through a few hoops to obtain them in the first place, for whatever business reasons they might have for that.

[SHimmer45]

i mean i would prefer to jump through the couple of hoops needs for KMS which makes licensing pretty fire and forget so to speak

[tmoon-mint]

I have used active directory based activation for as long as I can remember and never had an issue. Just have to fill out a form to request KMS keys. Once setup as long as you're on the domain any copies of Windows Server, Windows and Office will activate.

[Rockpile99]

Agree 100% with what tmoon-mint said. Been using AD activation for a few years now and it's so much easier (and reliable) than KMS. MS will provide KMS keys without any fuss - just fill out a support request via https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/supportrequestform/2afa6f15-b710-db46-909a-8346017c802f?sl=en-gb&sc=GB telling them agreement number and product etc (they were back to me within minutes last time).