How to activate Server 2012 Datacenter VMs using a DreamSpark retail key?

Hello,
I got a Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Retail key, and I was wondering how I should activate my virtual machines in order to have them recognize that they are in fact, virtual machines and that I should get unlimited activations.
From what I've
read elsewhere, (see Shane Cribbs' reply) I think you're supposed to get a separate product key for physical activations and another one for VM activations if you have a retail key. However, being a student, I got my key through DreamSpark,
and they only gave me the one retail key.
Is there any way I can activate my virtual machines in this scenario, or am I doomed to be VM-less?

Hi,
For licensing related issue, you’d better contact Microsoft licensing team. In the United States and Canada, you may call
the licensing team directly at 1-800-426-9400 (select option 4), Monday through Friday, 6:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. (PST) to speak directly to a Microsoft licensing specialist. In this way, you will know the detailed information about license.
Worldwide customers can use the Guide to Worldwide Microsoft Licensing Sites
http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/worldwide.aspx
to find contact information in their locations.
Thank you for your understanding!
Regards,
Arthur Li
TechNet Community Support

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Upgrade a Domain Controller running Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Eval

Hello,
because I couldn't wait for Server 2012 to show up on Dreamspark Premium I installed the Datacenter evaluation version after I found this blog
post telling me, I could simply enter my key when I get it to upgrade to the full version.
After entering the command I get notified that "Changing this Windows edition is not supported online for a domain controller.".
The TechNet article for upgrading evaluation versions states the following:
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and taking me to an article for installing/uninstalling ADDS without further comments.
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Regards,
Hans

Hi,
Please refer to the following Microsoft TechNet article to confirm if the steps of converting to full retail version are correct.
Evaluation Versions and Upgrade Options for Windows Server 2012
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj574204.aspx
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convert to full retail version and then promote it to an additional Domain Controller for this domain. After that, transfer FSMOs to this new Domain Controller and demote the original Domain Controller.
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TechNet Community Support

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Hi Zeeshan,
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I couldn't get a proper answer to my question off google which is why i posted it here, hoping for others with more knowledge to give me a hand.
I currently work at a primary school and we have 2 physical servers running Windows Server 2012 Datacenter. We have 3 virtual machines on each physical server which are all 2012 Datacenter too.
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Hi Christophe,
Thanks for replying. Only one virtual machine, our Domain controller is part of a hyper-v cluster. The other 4 are not.
I'm guessing that it would be easier, as your post states to do one server at a time while moving the virtual machines onto the second one?
Also what option out of the three should i select after i click on the move option and specify the second server?
Move the virtual machines data to a single location
Move the virtual machines data by selecting where to move the items
Move only the virtual machine.
I know this maybe a simple choice for some, but i have never done this before and i dont want to mess anything up.
Regards, Hasan

Downloaded Evaluation Version of Windows Server 2012 Standard- install is asking for product key

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Hi rhinoguy1,
Please down load ISO from following website :
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How to activate Windows Server 2012 Datacenter evaluation version with product key provided on MSDN's student account

Hi,
I downloaded
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says :
"If the server is a domain controller, you cannot convert it to a retail version. In this case, install an additional
domain controller on a server that runs a retail version and remove AD DS from the domain controller that runs on the evaluation version."
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Hoping to get a brief response....

Unless you have configured a whole lot of things into the DC running on the evaluation copy (should never install production on an evaluation copy), it would be simplest to start from scratch and reinstall.
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.:|:.:|:. tim

Server 2012 Datacenter Upgrade to Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

Good Day Everyone,
Ok so my dilemma is that I HAVE to upgrade one of our 2012 Datacenter Servers w/Hyper-V hosting to 2012 R2. The part that troubles me is that I have 3 Production VM's on this server, do I have to migrate these off the
Host Controller before I conduct the upgrade? Can I shut them down and just conduct the upgrade? What is the risk? I have backups of all the VM's, however I do not have another server currently setup to handle the Live Migration as they are full, but I could
make something work if I had to move them before the upgrade.

In terms of whether you can do an in place upgrade, yes you can. We've done it with some of our formerly 2012 datacentre servers, and upgraded them to R2 with the VMs remaining on there and it worked fine. The main issue is that while the upgrade is
taking place on the host server, the VMs will need to be shutdown (or optionally put into a saved state), so as long as you have a long enough maintenance window to allow that then you should be fine.
If the maintenance window is an issue for all or some of the VMs then you'd want to live migrate them to another server so they can continue running while the upgrade is done. Unfortunately it's been a while since we did our upgrades so I can't remember
how long the upgrade process actually took.
Fortunately 2012 VM's are completely compatible with 2012 R2 (but obviously not the reverse), so after the upgrade your VMs will power up and work as before. That said, once complete you'll want to upgrade integration services on all the guests so they gain
the benefits of the R2 host.

Windows Server 2012 HyperV VMs becoming extremely sluggish and slow

I have recently set up a new system for a client consisting of a single Dell T320 server with Xeon E5-2350 2.2GHz 6 core cPU and 32GB of RAM. Windows Server 2012 Standard is installed on the bare metal, and runs only the HyperV role. It is not
joined to any domains.
It hosts two VMs, one a Windows Server 2012 Standard VM containing the RDS related roles acting as remote desktop server, with 10GB RAM allocated and 3 cores. Only 5 people use the terminal server concurrently.
The second VM is a Windows Server 2008 R2 based primary domain controller, with 16GB of RAM allocated and 3 cores. It runs the AD role, as well as Exchange and GFI MailEssentials 2012. Avira is also installed on this VM.
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into a software emulation mode where everything runs like molasses. This affects BOTH VMs equally. For example, Exchange and GFI on the Windows 2008 R2 VM together consume about 25% CPU, most of it is spent in kernel CPU time. At the same
time, in the other Windows Server 2012 VM, svchost, Taskmgr, WMIPrvSE, LogonUI, Explorer, sqlservr, wsmprovhost etc. will all consume a total of about 70% CPU time, this time 99% of this is user time, not kernel time. When one user starts any application,
be that internet explorer, firefox or TaxPrep, the CPU spikes up to 100%.
All while nobody is using the system, the system is idle and no mails are flowing in or out of the system. A reboot of the VMs does not fix anything, even a reboot of the host server does not fix anything. When I yanked out the two power supplies
and performed a hardware diagnostic (which came back 100% OK), it booted up and the slowness was gone for 3 days, until today when it started acting up again like I described above.
One more thing, when the system behaves normally the sunspider javascript benchmark in IE10 takes 316ms to execute (average) on the HyperV host operating system. When the system goes slow like this, I pause the two VMs in HyperV then run sunspider
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Any ideas? This is a major problem and I have no idea what is causing it.

We have had the EXACT same thing happen with a Dell T320 on two separate servers. The first one was running SQL Server 2008 with nothing else funny going on. It ran fine for a month or so, then it developed this slowness issue. We finally installed SQL on
a loaner box (without Hyper-V) and it worked fine. We brought the T320 back to our shop and tested the hell out of it with Dell's assistance and it was NTF. Took it back onsite and moved an SBS 2011 VM over to it. After a few days, it ground to a halt. CPU
utilization was 100%. I started shedding services, killing Exchange, Sharepoint, etc. Even stripped to the essentials, the CPU was still up in the 60-70% range.
I put a T310 out onsite and downed the guest SBS vm. I copied the HUGE vhd over to the T310 (running Server 2008r2 with the Hyper-V role) and it ran perfectly. CPU at about 2-4%, spiking to 15% occasionally.
We finally concocted a story that the USB controller was bad, so they replaced the motherboard (not the CPUs) and it all seems to be working OK now after we sunk at least 100 man-hours into the problem.
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original posting.
MCP SBSC

Cant activate server 2012 standard

I have a problem I bought server 2012, but when I try to activate it it says: DNS name does not exist.
And it happens always so It just doesnt work somebody that knows the reason

Hi,
In addition, if you use a retail product key, you can try to activate your Windows by telephone.
1. Swipe in from the right edge of the screen, and then tap Search. Or, if you are using a mouse, point to the lower-right corner of the screen, and then click Search.
2. Type SLUI 04, and then tap or click the displayed icon to open the Windows Activation Wizard.
Hope this helps.
Jeremy Wu
TechNet Community Support

How to do Server 2012 R2 Network Policy Server MAC Authentication without adding ad users?

I have a Network Policy Server running on Server 2012 R2. I have set it up to do certificate and PEAP authentication for our 802.1x wireless authentication
and that works great.
Now I want to add a policy to this server so I can also do MAC address authentication our unauthenticated open wireless ssid so i can assign roles based on the
mac address. I got our Aruba controller setup to send the mac address to the radius server, but the radius server just denies access because I am not sure how to get it to use themsNPCallingStationID attribute.
I have found several ways do to this included adding active directory users for every single MAC address with the mac address as the username and password. I
do not want to do that. This is not an option.
I have also found several posts about using ieee802Device. I can't find a way to get that to work.
I also found a suggestion to use msNPCallingStationID ad attribute. I can easily set this for each user as their mac addresses but how do I configure the
NPS server to use this attribute to authenticate this?
If you have any other ideas on how to get MAC authentication to work, I would greatly appreciate it!
Thank you for your assistance!

Hi,
I think you may have some misunderstand about the MAC address Authorization, MAC address authorization is based on the MAC address of the network adapter installed in
the access client computer. Like ANI authorization, MAC address authorization uses the Calling-Station-ID attribute instead of user name and password or certificate-based credentials to identify the user during the connection attempt.
MAC address authorization is performed when the user does not type in any user name or password, and refuses to use any valid authentication method. In this case, Network
Policy Server (NPS) receives the Calling-Station-ID attribute, and no user name and password. To support MAC address authorization, Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) must have user accounts that contain MAC addresses as user names, therefore you need
add the MAC address as the computer user name and password,
To use the MAC address as user name and password is Cisco® switch require condition, about your switch device please ask your hardware vendor.
If you want to combine the MAC address MAC filtering and
EAP Authentication, you can refer the following related article:
Enhance your 802.1x deployment security with MAC filtering
http://blogs.technet.com/b/nap/archive/2006/09/08/454705.aspx
More information:
MAC Address Authorization
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd197535(v=ws.10).aspx
Authorization by User and Group
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd197615(v=ws.10).aspx
The similar thread:
NPS: Override User-Name and User Identity Attribute
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/6dd983f9-973f-4d23-be0c-032d3a1592d0/nps-override-username-and-user-identity-attribute?forum=winserverNAP
The related third party article:
Configuring IEEE 802.1x Port-Based Authentication
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst3550/software/release/12-2_25_see/configuration/guide/3550SCG/sw8021x.html#wp1170569
MAC Filters with Wireless LAN Controllers (WLCs) Configuration Example
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/wireless-mobility/wlan-security/91901-mac-filters-wlcs-config.html#backinfo
Hope this helps.

Error installing Office 2013 on Server 2012 R2 RDS - Error 25004: the product key you entered cannot be used on this machine

Hi there,
I really hope someone can help me as I am tearing my hair out trying to get this resolved!
I am working on a Server 2012 R2 server with RDS running. Before it was turned into a RDS server it had a copy of Office 2010 running as a trial to see would it work for the accounting package that is running for users via Remote Desktop. Trial worked ok
so it was converted into a RDS server. Now, as its a RDS it needs to run Office under a volume licence, which I have. However when trying to install I get the message: "Error 25004: the product key you entered cannot be used on this machine. this is most
likely due to previous Office 2013 trials being installed on the system."
In summary I have tried everything I can think of and find to remove all traces of the old Office from the machine but still this message persists. I have run the Fix It For Me uninstall from MS and it cannot find any Office installed. i have manually searched
through all of the Windows directories including Program Files and AppData and removed all traces of Office from there, I have searched the registry and removed all I can find from there.
Where or what file does the installer look at to see that a previous version was installed?
I cannot scrub this machine which I would have done long ago because there is another SQL Server based application running on it.
Really really appreciate anyone that can help me on this,
Thanks

Hi,
I have definitely heard your frustration, and I’ll try my best to help you.
Since Office 2010 installed on it before, you need to remove Office 2010 completely.
KB about this error:
http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/2792178
A similar issue is addressed here. Although this method is based on Office 2010, but we can have a try:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Office_Productivity/Office_Suites/MS_Office/Q_28475448.html
Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Best regards,
Greta Ge
TechNet Community Support
It's recommended to download and install
Configuration Analyzer Tool (OffCAT), which is developed by Microsoft Support teams. Once the tool is installed, you can run it at any time to scan for hundreds of known issues in Office
programs.

Remote Desktop Connection Server 2012 Clients only using on DC as Logon Server.

I am using Server 2012 and have an RDC Server running on a VM. Originally I had ordered the licensed version as Essentials was provided to me which does not allow for a full domain environment, which is required for the RDC server. Anyway, I
used Eval versions to get started, not thinking or realizing that the DC would never be able to get Activated since it is an Eval. So after 4 days I have finally, loaded Server 2012 on a new VM, promoted to DC, Transferred FSMO roles...DNS is up and
replicating across both DC's. The Eval keeps shutting off and was going to demote it and remove, but whenever it is shutdown the Clients receive a "No Logon Servers are available " error. I start up the old DC and it works. I doublechecked
all of the roles have been moved, I checked the RDC gateway, everything points to the same Domain information, but when I check an account using 'CMD set' it shows the old DC as the Logon Server. Is there something I am missing in the RD Gateway or somewhere
else. Is there a way to force it to use the new DC? I have tried setting the options in remote desktop connection to use a particular TS Gateway setting and it doesnt seem to work. Can someone please help me think about this and offer a
suggestion or let me know if you need more info. I can figure nothing else out at this point.
Thanks so much in Advance.
-T

it sounds like your clients / rdc servers may still be pointing to the old DC for DNS.
Can you check you have updated DNS on the clients to talk to your new domain controller.
Regards,
Denis Cooper
MCITP EA - MCT
Help keep the forums tidy, if this has helped please mark it as an answer
The new DC is the only DNS server listed on the RDC Server and is the only DNS listed for the clients other than the gateway which have as a secondary. If I change the static on the old DC I cannot login, as soon as I put it back, I can login and it
shows that DC as the logon server.
I did a simple recursive test on both DNS servers....The new Domain Controller passes, the Old One which I am trying to remove, does not.
I will reply with any other updates as I continue to look into this and thanks for the suggestions.
So I also Pinged the domain from the RDC Server as suggested and it replies back with the old DC IP.
Not sure why.

How to activate Server 2012 Datacenter VMs using a DreamSpark retail key?

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