Solved Confused About Activating With Hyper V

glnz · Oct 10, 2021

In my law firm's office, there are many PCs with Win 7 stickers on them that our IT team upgraded to Win 10 using a different license. May I use one of those now-unused Win7 stickers to activate a Win 11 in a Hyper-V virtual machine on my personal at-home Win 10 machine? (Our IT guys said it's OK with them.)

cereberus · Oct 10, 2021

glnz said:
In my law firm's office, there are many PCs with Win 7 stickers on them that our IT team upgraded to Win 10 using a different license. May I use one of those now-unused Win7 stickers to activate a Win 11 in a Hyper-V virtual machine on my personal at-home Win 10 machine? (Our IT guys said it's OK with them.)

Legally no as those are oem keys not retail keys.

NavyLCDR · Oct 10, 2021

cereberus said:
Legally no as those are oem keys not retail keys.

Again, there is a difference between what is legal and what violates the End User's License Agreement with Microsoft. You can violate the EULA and not be doing anything illegal.

pparks1 · Oct 11, 2021

When it comes to running Windows on a VM, I simply use the trial editions that Microsoft provides. I don't have any need for a legit license for a VM, as it's usually a short lived test environment.

cereberus · Oct 11, 2021

NavyLCDR said:
Again, there is a difference between what is legal and what violates the End User's License Agreement with Microsoft. You can violate the EULA and not be doing anything illegal.

Sure but it is all really semantics. Violating an EULA is no legal in contract terms, and MS could technically sue but the police would not get involved. I tend to take view if person is using unactivated VM to test it, that is acceptable, but if a person uses same VM for work, that is not acceptable. In the end, it is a personal integrity issue.

glnz · Oct 13, 2021

I have now activated my Win 11 Pro in Hyper-V on my Win 10 Pro host, and I activated the Win 11 VM with a Win 7 Pro OEM key sticker.

To see how, go to To activate Win 11, what types of older license are good?

Cheers!

ashnole · Nov 6, 2021

Bree said:
Unless you have an unlimited supply of Windows keys to burn, never ever just delete an activated VM when done with it. Export it or otherwise preserve its HWID for reuse later.

Why? If you used a product key to activate a VM which you then digitally linked to your MS account, can't that license be transferred to an actual physical machine later?

NavyLCDR · Nov 6, 2021

ashnole said:
Why? If you used a product key to activate a VM which you then digitally linked to your MS account, can't that license be transferred to an actual physical machine later?

No. MS does not allow transferring licenses between different machine types. And I don't think MS allows transferring licenses from VMs at all.

ashnole · Nov 6, 2021

NavyLCDR said:
No. MS does not allow transferring licenses between different machine types. And I don't think MS allows transferring licenses from VMs at all.

Thank you. That's what I wanted to know. I literally created an account here today to ask about this. So the answer to this thread of mine will be a big NO then and that the product key I used to activate the VMware VM will forever be tied to that particular VM? Is there a way to transfer a Windows 11 Pro digital license from a VMware VM to an actual physical machine?

ThrashZone · Nov 6, 2021

NavyLCDR said:
No. MS does not allow transferring licenses between different machine types. And I don't think MS allows transferring licenses from VMs at all.

Hi,
There are retail keys so they could be transferred.

NavyLCDR · Nov 6, 2021

ThrashZone said:
Hi,
There are retail keys so they could be transferred.

Transferring a digital license and reusing a retail product key are two entirely different things There are much less restrictions on reusing a retail product key then there are on transferring digital licenses.

ThrashZone · Nov 6, 2021

NavyLCDR said:
Transferring a digital license and reusing a retail product key are two entirely different things There are much less restrictions on reusing a retail product key then there are on transferring digital licenses.

Hi,
MS list all activations as digital licenses lol

NavyLCDR · Nov 6, 2021

ThrashZone said:
Hi,
MS list all activations as digital licenses lol

And still, though, reusing a retail product key is an entirely different process with less restrictions than transferring a digital license is. The main example is transferring an activated VM install to an unactivated physical machine. You cannot activate the install on the physical machine by transferring the digital license from the VM. You must reuse your retail product key in order to do so. Another difference between the two processes is that in order to transfer a digital license, it must be done through a MS account. Reusing a retail product key does not require a MS account. They are still two entirely different processes.

The question asked in post #27 was if a digital license can be transferred from a VM to a physical machine. The answer to that question is no, it can't. However, the retail product key may be reused to activate the physical machine. That does not transfer the digital license from the VM, it creates a brand new digital license for the physical machine - again, two completely different processes.

ThrashZone · Nov 6, 2021

Hi,
You don't know for sure which license the dude has
MS list all activations as digital licenses linked to ms account or not

NavyLCDR · Nov 6, 2021

ThrashZone said:
Hi,
You don't know for sure which license the dude has
MS list all activations as digital licenses linked to ms account or not

It does not matter which license the dude has. You still can't transfer a digital license from a VM to a physical machine. Microsoft won't let it happen. If you are going to activate the physical machine by transferring a digital license, it has to come from another physical machine, it can't come from a VM. Or, you can use a product key to activate the physical machine. And there is another caveat with Windows 10 and 11 digital licenses - there are no longer strictly OEM licenses. Any digital license can be changed to retail simply by changing the installed product key to the generic product key for that edition of Windows.

jimbo45 · Nov 6, 2021

johnlgalt said:
Psst - at least with the leak:

One of the digital licenses I have associated with my Microsoft account is from a Windows 7 --> Windows 10 upgrade, by using one of my TechNet Windows 7 keys to install Windows 10 the very first time.

I used the same windows 7 key in the WIn11 leak in a Hyper-V VM to activate it - and it activated.

Those old technet keys are good for 100's of activations -- one reason Ms dropped the program !!!!

Cheers
jimbo

Kari · Nov 6, 2021

NavyLCDR said:
You still can't transfer a digital license from a VM to a physical machine. Microsoft won't let it happen. If you are going to activate the physical machine by transferring a digital license, it has to come from another physical machine, it can't come from a VM.

Please, could you provide link / links to any official Microsoft article or Microsoft Doc document to confirm this?

I just made a test. As my test laptop already has existing digital licenses for all editions except Home Single Language, Education N and Enterprise N, I selected Education N for this test, to be sure physical installation on laptop will not be automatically activated.

I installed Education N on a Hyper-V VM, and activated it with a valid, VS / MSDN product key. When done, I checked it was listed on devices list on my MS account:

I booted the laptop from W11 install media, and clean installed Education N. It was not activated:

I selected Troubleshoot, and selected I recently changed hardware on this device:

I signed in to my MS account, and selected the earlier Education N from list:

Windows 11 Education N on my laptop was activated using the original license of my Hyper-V VM:

Kari

NavyLCDR · Nov 6, 2021

It seems as if Microsoft has changed their policy. Before Windows 11, their website for activating after a hardware change used to state that it had to be the same type of device. I stand corrected. Thank you for checking it out, @Kari. I wonder if they are also allowing unlimited "hardware changes" now, as well.

ashnole · Nov 7, 2021

A big, big thank you to Mr @Kari and Mr @NavyLCDR for clearing so many doubts & confusion I had. :thumbsup:

NavyLCDR · Nov 7, 2021

ashnole said:
A big, big thank you to Mr @Kari and Mr @NavyLCDR for clearing so many doubts & confusion I had.

Well, I apologize for having incorrect information at first about being able to transfer digital license from VM to physical machine. However, the discussion regarding reusing a retail product key vs. transferring a digital still holds true - they are two entirely different processes.

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