The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation
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While I don't want to summarize this I kind of have too.
Microsoft never sells licensing direct to the consumer (in this case the business) it's all third party even through their licensing channel.
So it's very likely that someone in that line screwed up and assigned the wrong license version or something else.
While I'm not downplaying the cost (it is very real) I am saying that a lot of this can be avoided when purchasing physical keys.
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@DustinB3403 said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
Microsoft never sells licensing direct to the consumer (in this case the business) it's all third party even through their licensing channel.
So it's very likely that someone in that line screwed up and assigned the wrong license version or something else.Totally possible. Except that we manually verified this, as did the vendor, as did Microsoft. And it was, at least according to Microsoft, the right license and in the end, it is the one that they used.
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@DustinB3403 said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
I am saying that a lot of this can be avoided when purchasing physical keys.
A lot of products don't have physical keys. Those that do, often come at a pretty hefty price premium to do so. Physical Windows Server is, I believe, a pretty big percentage more expensive, than from the volume licensing center.
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Physical licenses then introduce the next cost - license retention and management. A different cost, but still a cost.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
@DustinB3403 said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
I am saying that a lot of this can be avoided when purchasing physical keys.
A lot of products don't have physical keys. Those that do, often come at a pretty hefty price premium to do so. Physical Windows Server is, I believe, a pretty big percentage more expensive, than from the volume licensing center.
Comparative to the $400 additional (estimated) spend on everyone's time?
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@DustinB3403 said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
@scottalanmiller said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
@DustinB3403 said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
I am saying that a lot of this can be avoided when purchasing physical keys.
A lot of products don't have physical keys. Those that do, often come at a pretty hefty price premium to do so. Physical Windows Server is, I believe, a pretty big percentage more expensive, than from the volume licensing center.
Comparative to the $400 additional (estimated) spend on everyone's time?
Hard to say. It's all about averages. In the case of this scenario, the risk was primarily up front. In the real world of an SMB with high turn over, the risk to physical licenses might be even higher. First, an increase in cost. Perhaps $100 more per license. Then the manual process of storing them. Then the hopes that those keys will not be lost over time. At first this might seem very easy to manage, but it is way harder than it seems for a normal business. A human has to retain and protect those keys for many years. And match them up to things. This quickly becomes time consuming as keys begin to be stored, tracked, retired, handed from person to person. It's the kind of thing that tends to fall apart, even in a small company with just two people. It can work, but in the real world, it rarely does. Lost keys or misused keys would, on average, likely cost even more.
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Managing these licenses and their bizarre limitations, caveats, etc. is even greater still. 2 audits and 1 they are trying to get me to do, (but have ignored so far) are also not included in most people's cost projections.
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@wrx7m said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
Managing these licenses and their bizarre limitations, caveats, etc. is even greater still. 2 audits and 1 they are trying to get me to do, (but have ignored so far) are also not included in most people's cost projections.
It's very true. A lot of skills specific to Windows Licensing are needed. Between knowing what to buy, when to change, how to update, how to deal with fake audits, how to deal with real audits, maintaining court-ready documentation... all skills unnecessary for macOS, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, etc. That's a huge skill set to maintain all the time. And one that carries a lot of liability.
And loads of social engineering scams target this weak point in companies.
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@scottalanmiller said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
Just looking at this with a customer that just put in a new Windows 2019 server. The machine was purchased with a volume license agreement for Server 2019 Standard. Everything should be super easy, in theory. Problem is, license key from the volume license center doesn't work. We spend a bit of time trying to get this to apply, but no luck.
I have run into a similar situation this morning and not being able activate the VLSC liscense.
Before I decided to call MS and getting frustrated, I was able to activate from an elevated command line.
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk <product key>Throwing this out here in case someone comes along this post at a later time.
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@pmoncho said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
@scottalanmiller said in The Hidden Cost of Licensing Windows Server - Activation:
Just looking at this with a customer that just put in a new Windows 2019 server. The machine was purchased with a volume license agreement for Server 2019 Standard. Everything should be super easy, in theory. Problem is, license key from the volume license center doesn't work. We spend a bit of time trying to get this to apply, but no luck.
I have run into a similar situation this morning and not being able activate the VLSC liscense.
Before I decided to call MS and getting frustrated, I was able to activate from an elevated command line.
cscript c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk <product key>Throwing this out here in case someone comes along this post at a later time.
I've heard that that often works. We had tried that in our case and it had failed.
