Taking Advantage of Volume Licensing : Choosing the Right Volume License Key for Windows

When you want to decide which license key to use for your Windows, you have to answer two main questions:

• Which products am I going to deploy?

• Which activation method am I going to use?

For Windows, license keys are organized in product groupings and generations. There are four product groupings that cover all the Windows client and Windows Server operating systems. One grouping is for the client editions; the other three cover the server editions. Currently there are two generations, the Vista/Windows Server 2008 generation and the Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 generation. Table 1 gives an overview of the product groupings and generations for the Windows operating system.

Volume License customers will receive a key for each product grouping, corresponding to the products that they are entitled to use based on their Volume License agreement. If a customer is entitled to use all Windows operating systems, the customer should see eight available Windows keys. The keys can be retrieved from the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center website at:

www.microsoft.com/licensing/servicecenter/home.aspx

Deciding to use KMS, MAK, or a combination of these methods mainly depends on the type of environment and the number of systems for which you want to use product activation. As a best practice, always try to go for the KMS solution, because it's the solution that puts you in control of your volume licensing. However, in some scenarios the KMS solution isn't suitable and you must use MAK activation.

There are a few questions that need to be answered in order to determine the best activation method:

How many clients am I going to activate?

The KMS activation method only works when the activation threshold is reached. For the client OS the threshold is 25 and for the server OS it's 5. If the activation threshold cannot be reached, you must use the MAK activation method.

For example, if you have 3 servers and 3 clients, you will be able to activate the server OS because the activation count is greater than 5, but you will not be able to activate the client OS because the threshold is below 25.

Note that with the latest version of the KMS software there is no longer the requirement that the to-be-activated OS must be physical in order to count for the activation count limit.

How much risk to product key exposure do I want to take?

When you're using MAK activation, a unique product key for your organization is used to activate each product individually. This key could potentially be extracted by one of the many product extraction utilities circulating across the Internet and be used to activate other installations of the same product but not owned by the company. When using KMS, the product key that is used on the to-be-activated client is a generic one that is publicly known and indicates to the client that it should use a KMS infrastructure for its activation. The product key unique for your organization can only be found on the KMS server.

How often do my clients connect to the corporate network?

When using KMS for product activation, the clients using KMS try to contact the KMS host every 7 days; if after 180 days this attempt is still unsuccessful, the client will go into reduced functionality mode (RFM) When using MAK, clients connect to the Microsoft activation services over the Web directly or by using a Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) proxy scenario.

Does the environment that hosts my clients have Internet access?

When your environment doesn't have any Internet access and the number of clients is above the KMS activation threshold, you should use KMS in order to activate your clients. If the KMS activation threshold can't be reached, the MAK proxy scenario provided by the VAMT can help you activate your MAK clients. Or you could use MAK activation by phone. If your environment provides Internet access, you can use either method for activation.

As mentioned earlier, there's also a hybrid solution using both KMS and MAK. You could, for example, choose to use MAK activation for clients that aren't connected to the internal network within the required time frame, while using KMS for clients that are located within your internal network.

Microsoft developed the VAMT to help you activate clients centrally; while the first version could only help you activate KMS clients, version 2 can also help you configure KMS clients.

Office 2010 Uses SPP

With the release of Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft announced that Office 2010 will use the SPP as its activation method. This means that both MAK and KMS are available as activation methods for Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Project 2010, and Microsoft Visio 2010 as well. When using a KMS server, you have to extend that server with an update to support activation of Office 2010. The Office KMS server can run beside the KMS server you already have for your Windows Activation.