MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Our corporate laptops are given out with Windows 7 licensed through volume licensing. The windows key in the registry is BBBBB etc.
The hardware itself seems also to be licensed, there's a sticker with a key on it under the battery. Is this license now spare? Can I use it in a VM only on the machine itself? So the host would be running under a corporate volume license, and the guest under the OEM license?
yes the license will probably be unused and can be used elsewhere.. obviously it's not legal, as the license belongs to your company not you, but as it's not in use anywhere else MS will activate it.
The licence is specific to the physical machine and not transferable from a legal standpoint.
However, it's unused so there's nothing to stop you from using it somewhere else. It should activate fine in a VM.
I think, anyway.
That license can be used in a vm as long as that vm is only used on the original machine.
The situation is that we are working with a complex product stack that we have set up in a Windows VM, and we want our devs to be able to distribute it so they can have a sandbox environment. If we were to de activate the vm before sharing, this would be legal I think...? They would have to activate it again with their own laptop oem key.
If you have a volume licence, why not use that to licence your VM?
Cos that would require finding out who to ask.. Which is a lot more daunting than it sounds!
Well, you could get in a spot of bother for handing out unlicenced or incorrectly licenced software, so it's probably in your best interest to find out.
If you have a volume licence, why not use that to licence your VM?
Often the volume license T&Cs requires a license to already be on the machine, eg. XP Home, XP Pro, Win7 Home to allow you to legally run a VL key. This wouldn't be the case on a VM
Depends on your volume licence though.
Hmm.. Thanks folks, I really do need to clear this up. Or get the product working on Linux :-/