Creating a Virtual Machine Manager Guest OS Profile for volume clients that use KMS

I’m sitting in a VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) session by Mikael Nystrom called “Building The Master Image”. He provided an answer to a problem I’ve been wondering about (but honestly haven’t really pursued) for a long time.

The OS Guest Profile is a VMM component that specifies the operating system configuration to be used when VMM builds a new VM. When you build an OS Guest Profile, one of the fields you must complete is the product key. No problem, right? Well yes-ish. If you are building a Windows 2008 / R2 or Vista / Windows 7 machine in volume configuration, the preferred method is to use KMS. That’s the session I gave yesterday.

The problem is that a volume-built KMS client does not require a license key – indeed there’s no place for it. And there’s no equivalent key supplied with your license to put in the profile’s license key field. So what’s a VMM admin to do?

What I just learned is that there’s a table in the Volume Activation Deployment Guide that contains KMS client setup keys to be used exactly for that purpose. Depending on which OS you’re building, you use the corresponding key in the Guest OS Profile. You can bet I’m going to include this in the next version of my Volume Activation talk.

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