in the good old days of windows xp pro, all i need is the key. so to deploy PCs, stick the key in the sysprep inf and bob's your uncle.

what about windows 7? company is looking into deploying windows 7. we have enterprise/corp license with microsoft (where we can download the iso from microsoft).

is it more complicated with the activation, etc?

 

We use a KMS activation server at my Uni

Download Confirmation

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/e...displayLang=en

may help

 

Volume licensing accounted for around 80% of piracy apparently and so it's now changed.

As Mike said above, we use a Key Management Server (KMS).

This is a Windows server which you enter your volume licence key and validate it with MS.

Clients in your enterprise (Vista or 2008) will look for a KMS server by using a DNS SRV record _VLMCS._tcp._msdcs.*zone name* (needs to be configured as port 1688)

Once you've configured your KMS server it will not start activating licences until you have 25 machines for Vista or 5 servers for 2008.

Virtual machines do not count towards the final total.

The other activation method is Multiple Activation Key (MAK) which activates systems on a one time basis using MS hosted activation services.

In the larger environments KSM would be the standard.

There's a few decent white papers around for KMS if you need more info.

 

Windows 7 configures itself automatically as a KMS client so you won't need to do any further client configuration.

 

oh yeah, i did see in the download the option for KMS or MAK. will look deeper into this. we skip vista, so this new activation thing is all new to me.

 

its called Volume Activation 2

and explained in this White Paper

Download details: Volume Activation 2.0 Technical Guidance