VMWare Workstation 11 & working Cloned win 10 now not activated

Hi
I'm unable to help but will be watching the thread and investigating. I have a 8.1 VM in Workstation 11 that I run on my MacBook and was wondering about it's upgrade...

Think I might have found the reason from another website, need to do further testing.

When you clone a virtual machine, it asks you what to name the new VM and then it makes all of the necessary changes to all of the filenames. When you copy a VM, all of that information (filenames, directories, etc.) stay exactly the same. But something else happens when you clone an VM that doesn't happen when you copy it. Since VMs are completely software-based versions of an Intel-based PC, they also include a virtual networking interface that, like real PCs, has a unique MAC address (the unique address that helps networks tell network attached device apart from another). When you clone a PC, the clone gets a new MAC address.

So when you copy or clone a virtual machine there is something interesting that happens is when you move an existing VMware-based VM from one computer to another. The first time you try to run that VM, it detects that the VM was moved and asks if you want to keep it associated with VMware's unique identifier (known as the UUID) for that virtual machine, or if you want to create one. According to VMware, if you create a new UUID that will trigger a change to the MAC address which in turn could awaken the licensing Gods at Microsoft.

Activation status should not change. Once activated the system should stay activated. Of course, if several VMachines appear on the Internet with the same product key and identical activation information then Microsoft will assume the system has been pirated and will disable the activation key.

I know YOU are not pirating Windows, but wanted to make sure that other readers were aware of the possible consequences of doing that sort of thing.

Hi there

Activation status CAN change on a VM - especially if you CLONE say a VM and run it on a different HOST machine. It largely depends on any hardware changes in the "Virtual BIOS" which the activation servers detect. Sometimes the cloning works perfectly - other times you might get asked to re-activate -- especially if you say "Update VMWARE Tools" when updating VMware from version 10.X (workstation) to version 11.X

I think you just have to take pot luck on this one.

Copying the whole VM directory seems to work better than using the "Clone VM" process in VMware workstation though.

What also works is running Acronis (bootable version) from INSIDE the VM - save the image to a shared drive and Restore again from inside a new VM.

The UUID could have something to do with it -- that at least is unique and we won't run out of UUID's for the lifetime of THE UNIVERSE -- just using hardware - won't do the trick and product keys similarly as there are zillions of VL keys out there too (Multiple activation ones) so there must be ZILLIONS of identical VM's out there.

Cheers
jimbo

Kesto said:

For some reason everytime I open VWS11 it unresponds for a while before finally loading then I create a new VM and start it and it unresponds for a while again then after I install the OS + drivers it unresponds again but never responds back.

Hi there

"Unresponds" ???? don't understand what you mean.

What HOST and what VM's are you running. Have you also allocated enough RAM for the VM.

Cheers
jimbo