This is a follow-up to a blog post in February about my KMS activation experience (Windows Activation using KMS). Windows Production Activation in the personal computer space is a little confusing but in the corporate world it get a bit more complicated due to the complexities of licensing software in extremely large global companies. I wanted add reference material that was provided to me by a Microsoft Windows Activation Support Engineer by the name of Tarun Chhabra. Not a lot of editorial stuff here just good reference material.
I submitted an incident regarding issues we were experiencing in the environment. I was fortunate to have Tarun pick up the phone and have him assigned to the case as he was most pleasant, understood the issue and the symptoms as I was explaining them and actually partnered with me in the solution as opposed to telling me to click without an explanation as to the outcome. In a nutshell, the KMS host suddenly decided not to process server activations. The VMAT tool could talk to the servers. The servers could talk to the KMS host but neither could complete the activation process.
One thing that we did discover was the fact that one of the servers had a time zone set different to the KMS host. We were sure that was it but it wasn’t. It happened that the KMS host originally deployed at the beginning of the year used a license key that had been activated beyond the number of times allowed (it’s five) and so it “fell out of grace” and would no longer process activations. The solution was to contact Microsoft Licensing and get an activation reset. This proved to be a story in itself that will be covered in another blog post.
Here is a link to Tarun’s article that you can download.
So here’s a video demonstrating how to implement the Key Management Service (KMS) in your organization. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=22110
Following are the Microsoft knowledge base article and documents which would be helpful for you:
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938450 (Common Activation error codes)
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff793433.aspx (Slmgr Options)
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950929 (How to find a phone number for a Microsoft Product Activation Center)
So that’s it. Hope these prove usefull to you.
This posting is provided “as is” with no warranties, guaranties or any rights whatsoever. All content is based on the author’s experiences and opinions and is not intended to influence the actions of the reader.
