How to create a sysprepped W2K3 Server - MSDN license

[pmaertens]

Hi,

in our company we have a MSDN subscriber license (also Action pack subscriber) and so we have limited license keys.

We develop sharepoint solutions for our customers and we need a VPC for all our team members. We could always recreate a new VPC but that's time consuming. If we create one vpc with everything on, we have to copy 25GB (time consuming) and also, if we need specific specifications (like using a multi server farm, office 2003, ...) we need to recreate the VPC.

We are wondering if we could create one VPC, activate it and sysprep it so that when a developer is using a sysprep image he should not activate it again, so that we only use one license key instead of using all our license keys when we copied the vpc to 10 teammembers.

Regards,

Pieter

 

[Nelviticus]

Spooky, I was reading this article just the other day:
Sysprepping a virtual machine

Reading that page and some of the Microsoft articles referenced on it, it seems that when you first boot a freshly sysprepped image a new System ID (SID) is generated, so if you used your MSDN key to activate that machine it would take up one of your 10 activations.

I have read before on MSDN that if you want to do the kind of thing you're talking about the recommended course of action is to just not activate the OS. Your virtual machine will then only last for 30 days before locking you out, which might not be long enough to do large projects, but at least you can make as many new machines from the sysprepped image as you want.

However, an MSDN licence is single-user only. Legally, if you have one licence then that's for one person - see the first paragraph in the MSDN subscriptions FAQ. Strictly speaking you should get an MSDN licence for each developer. If you do that, each developer can licence their own base image (from your original sysprepped one), make it read-only then use a differencing disk for each new project.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[Nelviticus]

*edit: according to the FAQ I linked to:

For Windows, MSDN subscribers have a 60-day grace period before the product must be activated. If you will be reinstalling the software in less than 60 days, you do not need to activate it. Please note that Windows Update and Windows Genuine Advantage require that the installation be activated.

So it's quite a bit longer than the 30 days I thought it was.

Regards

Nelviticus