monline

I was evaluating various virtual servers and their support for running fully virtualized Windows guests. After having played around with Xen I was about to test VMware Server. Since I already had a fully set up test VM in Xen with a raw disk image file, I simply wanted to reuse this image in a VMware virtual machine. I've done the required prerequisites (updated the IDE controller to the Standard PCI ... one, shut down the vm, converted the raw disk image with qemu-img to the vmdk format and created a vm in VMware Server using this image file). After starting up Windows (2003 Enterprise Edition) it told me that the underlying hardware has changed substantially (sure ... I tested Xen on another server with a different CPU, etc.) and I'm required to reactivate Windows. Now what the hell? During the setup I used a VLK (volume license key) and of course no activation was required. But it seems that even VLK setups require "activation" in case you change some basic hardware. It'd be interesting to find out what hardware change triggers reactivation in this case. The same as in a standard (non-VLK) Windows setup or is there some difference?