Hyper-V and activation issues

[Chuckster]

I have a few VMs running under hyper-v. My issue is that when I back the VMs onto, say, an external HDD for storage and later copy them back to the server... they need re-activating again.

 

Why is this? The hardware hasn't changed whatsoever.

 

ESXi doesn't do this so why does hyper-v? Anyone got a workaround/solution to the problem?

[SYNACK]

This could depend on the time between the VMs being booted, all the new software activates every 180 days or so and if it skips that interval it will complain until it has the opertunity to reactivate.

 

I have moved a bunch of VMs from one Hyper-V server to another which has not ended up requireing reactivation. Anything above 2008 has this kind of activation method. It would take a very specific corruption to cause it to require a reactivation and as its a VM it would not detect a hardware change so I can only deduce that it is the activation timeout especially if the VM was near the end of its window when you copied it.

 

Have you got KMS servers setup as these should handle automatic reactivations even in this kind of scenario.