Windows licensing got more and more and complicated over the years. With Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1, Microsoft changed the rules again. In this post, I summarized the most important facts about Windows licensing, KMS 1.1 (Key Management Services) and VAMT 1.1 (Volume Activation Management Tool). And of course, I couldn’t help myself but complain again about the extra work Microsoft imposed on us.

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Almost all the IT news sites covered this great news. I think it was predictable that Microsoft would remove Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM) sooner or later. I am just a little surprised that they gave up so soon. My personal term for RFM and Vista activation in general is Windows Genuine Activation mess (WGA). If you have been reading this blog for some time now, then you know what I am talking about.

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It was hard to miss the news about the WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage (?)) outage Microsoft had this weekend. Just in case you managed it somehow, you might want to catch up on it in this Computerworld article. Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage blog has an update about the “continuing investigation”. Alex Kochis claims that “fewer than 12,000 systems were affected”.

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Thanks to everyone who took part in my KMS (Key Management Service) vs. MAK (Multiple Key Management)
survey. 270 voted so far for one of the four options, I offered in this poll. You could choose among four options to activate Vista in a corporate environment: KMS, MAK, MAK and KMS, and OEM/retail. The fifth option is for those of you, who still have to make that choice.

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After summarizing all pros and cons for MAK and KMS activation, I am still undecided as to which option is better. I am curious to know which solution you would prefer. I would also like to know why you decided for one or the other solution. You can leave your thoughts as a comment in this post. If you don’t have the time for this, you can just take part in the opinion poll. If you’re unsure, then one of two these posts might be of help:

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Microsoft published a paper explaining how to isolate the KMS (Key Management Service) using IPsec. KMS doesn’t require any kind auf authentication. Therefore, anyone who gets network access to your KMS server is able to activate its Vista machine this way.

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Some days ago, I blogged about the pros and cons of KMS (Key Management Service). In this post, I summarized the pros and cons of using MAK (Multiple Activation Key), the second option for activating Vista in a corporate environment.

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Some days ago, I published the first part of my review of VAMT where I wrote about my experiences with the Status Collection and the MAK management functionality. Today, I’ll discuss the most interesting features of VAMT, i.e. its ability to deploy MAK keys to Vista machines.

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I have been spending quite some time now figuring out Vista’s activation mechanisms, and I think I know all of its options. The main question, however, is, would you use MAK (Multiple Key Management) or KMS (Key Management Service)? In this article, I summarized the pros and cons of KMS. In one of my next posts, I’ll write about the advantages and disadvantages of MAK activation. If you are not yet familiar with both technologies, I suggest reading one of my introductory articles about Vista activation first (see links above).

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Sometime ago, I reported that we were unable to set up our KMS (Key Management Service) under Windows Server 2003 because we already exceeded the number of allowed KMS installations. You can only install 6 KMS hosts by default. Since we accidently used the KMS key to activate some Vista clients, we couldn’t use this key anymore to activate the KMS host on a Windows server.

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Last Friday, I blogged about the “Skipream hack” that lets you use Vista without activating it. A commentator here on 4sysops linked to an article on a Microsoft blog claiming that this workaround won’t work. Although the arguments of Alex Kochis, the author of this post, are quite convincing, it is strange somehow that Brian Livingston, who is supposed to be a reliable source, purports that the Skiprearm trick actually worked in his tests.

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You probably know that you can reset the grace period up to three times with the command slmgr -rearm. This “rearming” allows you to run Vista without license key up to four months. It seems that Brian Livingston has found a method to prolong this period indefinitely using the SkipRearm registry setting.

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VAMT is a free Microsoft tool that helps companies manage Vista activation using MAKs (Multiple Activation Key). It is also useful for organizations working with KMS. VAMT has four core features: Status Collection and Reporting, MAK management, MAK Independent Activation, and MAK Proxy Activation. In this post, I’ll only cover the first two features. I’ll write about MAK Independent Key Activation and MAK Proxy Activation soon.

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Many new IT news sites and blogs reacted to this article on KezNews which claims that it is possible to get a valid Vista product key using a brute-force-attack. Although it is quite obvious, that it is almost mathematically impossible to get a valid key this way much sooner than the next big bang, many seem to be excited about cracking Microsoft’s WGA (I call it Windows Genuine Activation mess).

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Some days ago, I introduced KMS (Key Management Service) as one option to activate Vista in a corporate environment. Today, I’ll summarize the most important facts about MAK (Multiple Activation Key), the second option.

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