Windows Volume License Activation 2.0 in a Multi-Tenant Environment

While Windows Volume License Activation is designed to automate and manage the activation process for volume license customers, it's a little more challenging in a multi-tenant data center environment such as the MSPC. Within our data center we have groups or clusters of virtualized data centers - each consisting of its own security or Windows domain. In this type of situtation we'll need to manually assign the KMS host and force activation. This process is defined in the onlnie documentation for "Volume Activation 2.0" however for easier reference, here are the steps:

 Manually Assign a KMS Host

If your network does not support DDNS, you need to manually assign a KMS host to your KMS clients. Manually assigning a KMS host disables auto-discovery of KMS on a KMS client.

 

To manually assign a KMS host to a KMS client

1. Log on to the KMS client computer.

2. Open an elevated command prompt. To do this, click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.

3. At the command prompt, type one of the following options and press Enter:

a. To assign a KMS host using the host's FQDN, type:
cscript \windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /skms <KMS_FQDN>:<port>

b. To assign a KMS host using the host's version 4 IP address, type:
cscript \windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /skms <IPv4Address><:port>

c. To assign a KMS host using the host's version 6 IP address, type:
cscript \windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /skms <IPv6Address><:port>

d. To assign a KMS host using the host's NETBIOS name, type:
cscript \windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /skms <NetbiosName><:port>

After assigning the KMS host, the system can then be actived by again using the slmgr.vbs script along with the activation parameter:

cscript \windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato

Jeffrey Amels - MPSC Technical Operations Lead - jamels@microsoft.com