It seems that I got more or less 10 activations on a DataCenter Product key when activating VMs on a single server. Not quite what I had been reading :-)
I have 3 single CPU socket (quad core) processor servers, each with 16GB RAM. Hyper-V Server 2012 (the free download one) is installed as each server's hypervisor. I find that the hyper-v installer is much easier to deal with to create a VM server
than the full install.
I assign one DataCenter license to each server, 3 in all. All VMs created on each server are activated using its assigned DataCenter product key.
When I try to activate additional VMs on that physical machine running Hyper-V server, I get error 0xC004C008 "The activation server determined
that the specified product key could not be used".
1) Is it correct that a DataCenter product key can be used on a single Hyper-V server to activate many Virtual Machines on that server? I have read that from a licensing perspective, DataCenter can have up to 1024 VMs on a single Hyper-V server.
2) I am guessing that in the normal course of development/test, I activated this key probably 10-12 times, once for each VM on that server. This seems to be much lower than what I think is allowed. Why did I run out of activations for that DataCenter
product key?
3) Am I supposed to install the full Server 2012 product as the hypervisor instead of the freely downloadable Hyper-V Server? Is that why I only got 10 activations for VMs?
- I really like the low impact, already configured server core like install of the Hyper-V Server installer, and dont really want to deal with the full Datacenter install if at all possible.
I should add that the key is from our Bizspark/MSDN account, but I'm thinking that shouldn't matter?
Any help greatly appreciated,
Joe