I suppose, most organizations use Microsoft's Key Management Services (KMS) to activate Vista/Windows 7 and Server 2008/R2 machines. The Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) is usually used by smaller organizations which prefer to activate Windows with MAK or retail product keys. However, even if you work with KMS, VAMT can be useful to keep track of your Windows activations. KMS still only has a command line interface and VAMT has a nice GUI which gives you a good overview of the activation status of all Windows machines. In this post, I will summarize the enhancements of VAMT 2.0 compared to VAMT 1.2. VAMT 1.2 is part of the WAIK and already supports Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. VAMT 1.1, which is available as a separate download, only supports Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Please note that VAMT 2.0 is still in beta. For an introduction to VAMT please read my review of VAMT and my article about proxy activation with VAMT.
- Pip install Boto3 - Thu, Mar 24 2022
- Install Boto3 (AWS SDK for Python) in Visual Studio Code (VS Code) on Windows - Wed, Feb 23 2022
- Automatically mount an NVMe EBS volume in an EC2 Linux instance using fstab - Mon, Feb 21 2022
MMC 3-based user interface
VAMT 2.0 uses the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3. The main difference to the interface of VAMT 1.2 is that there now is a third pane in the middle where the managed computers are displayed. In VAMT 1.2, you had to create a folder before you could add computers. In VAMT 2.0, these folders can't be added anymore. This might be a disadvantage in large environments. If you want to add new computers you have to click on the Products folder. New is that you can use LDAP queries to add computers. VAMT 1.2 only allows you to manually add computers and search for computers in Active Directory or Workgroup.
Command line interface
It is now possible to run VAMT 2.0 from a command line interface, allowing you to use the tool in scripts. This enables you to schedule Windows activation tasks. To learn more about VAMT's command line interface switches, you can run just run vamt /?
Install products key remotely
Aside from the command line interface, this is probably the most interesting new feature in VAMT 2.0. With VAMT 1.2, you can only remotely activate Windows machines. But this assumes that the correct product key is already installed on the client computer. VAMT 2.0 has a new product key folder where you can add your own keys. To remotely install a product key, you have to right click on the corresponding machines and then select the key from your VAMT database.
Import data
If you already scanned your network with a VAMT 1, then you can save the data to a .cil file and import it to VAMT 2. The difference between opening and importing a .cil file is that the latter won't overwrite the already loaded (Computer Information List). VAMT will remove all duplicates. Note that you can't open .cil files in VAMT 1.2 that you saved with VAMT 2.0.
Office 2010 support
As you probably know, Office 2010 also requires activation. It is only available as a beta, but if you want to try how Office activation works in a network, then you need VAMT 2.0 (or KMS 2.0 in Windows Server 2008 R2).
Last activation status
This is just a minor enhancement but it can be helpful sometimes. You can display the last activation status of a computer through its context menu. It is the same message you see in the "Status of the last action" column. The problem is that you often can't see the whole message because it doesn't fit in the column. With this new command, you spare yourself from resizing the VAMT window. The arrows on the right hand side allow you to scroll through all computers.
Hi Michael
I am actually new to licensing topic and trying to figure out how to activate Windows 7 machines in our environment. Any suggestion, would be of great help.
We are using a MDT Media on a USB to deploy Windows 7 image.
When we were using the MAK key in the unattended.xml, the Windows 7 machines were contacting MS servers to activate.
But now were are instruced to remove the key from the image or any other file(unattend.xml) for security reasons.
Hence we thought of using VAMT to activate the client machines so that we can securely place the key in VAMT .
But the issue is that, after deploying Windows 7, the client machines are contacting a KMS server in our network and getting activated.
We do not want the client machines to activate this way since we should not use that particular KMS server to activate.
Is it possible to tell the client machines to contact our VAMT machine and activate automatically instead of contacting that KMS server?
Any possible solution which allows us to remove the key from the image and other files, store it in a safe location and activate the Windows 7 clients using our MAK key?
Thanks
Hi Michael, Actually I’m working as a consultant and I’ve came across an error with the VAMT 2.0. My partners were using the VAMT 1.2 version and due to has installed Office 2010, being supported by this version, he wanted to install VAMT 2.0. He has around 1000 Clients machines using KMS and registered on VAMT 1.2. We got the file .CIL from 1.2 and tried to import to the VAMT 2.0 version, after choosen the file on the server, we received the following error:
—————————
Volume Activation Management Tool
—————————
Input string was not in a correct format.
—————————
OK
—————————
Note: Importing from 1.2 to 1.2 version, it works fine.
I’d like to know if has any kind of incompatibility or something else which is generating this issue
Remembering that we followed some MSFT articles, and the procedure has been done correctly. It is just with this importing (.CIL file) with different VAMT versions.
Regards,
Hi Michael, I am new to using MAK and have a question. We use around 150 machines in a rental enviroment and are looking for a new way to keep Office 2010 activated (or should i say to reavtivate office) on our machines as we bring them back in-house and image them back to a clean slate.
From what I Have been able to find I think that MAK with VAMT is our best option. What I am concerned about is that I need a way to activate our machines over and over as we re-image them and not use up our block of activations. Is this something that VAMT can do?
From my research I think I can assume that KMS would not be an option because these are not machines that will reside on our network and can sometimes be in the field for longer then the 180 days. In our business we can’t have clients seeing “please activate office”.
I am sorry to ask this of you, but I have spend all day searching forums and microsofts pages and so far have come up blank on a solid answer as to wether this would work for our perticular needs.
Best Reguards,
Steve