migration from xen preserving hardware info

[frhack]

Hi,

I succesfully migrated a VM from xen to proxmox on the same host (I mean the same physical hardware machine).
The VM is a Win 2008 R2 with terminal services and Office 2013.

Now the problem is that after the VM migration, Office 2013 requires reactivation but it is no more possible to reactivate the license.

This is a huge problem, the VM is used in a hospital where many users must access Office via terminal services.

Given that the hardware is the same, is it possible to configure Proxmox so for this VM it will report the exact same hardware informations of the old xen ?
I suspect the problem is in:

• reported CPU model
• reported Bios name/version/date/etc

Please help me to complete this migration

thanks.

 

[Folke]

Hi,
the bios usually exposes a unique ID which is often used to check if the PC has changed [0]. If you go to the options of your VM and edit the SMBIOS settings, you can set the uuid and a lot of other values. You'll probably need to boot into the vm on your old hypervisor first, to extract those values.

When switching to a different hypervisor, from the vm's perspective, a lot more than your bios can change, even if the underlying hardware is the same, so this might not be the silver bullet. It might be easier to just call up Microsoft, I had some luck with that a couple of years back, but that was for a windows pro license that I wanted to migrate to a different PC.

[0] https://www.nextofwindows.com/the-best-way-to-uniquely-identify-a-windows-machine

 

[JSChasle]

Hi, did you find out how to make it work. I have kind of the same problem (obsolete software is hardware bind and is still in use). For myself migrating from VMWare to Proxmox and its my last server that I have trouble with. and unfortunately the software vendor does not support that software anymore.

 

[_gabriel]

you can't expect keeping licences actived when you change the hypervisor, even if host is the same, virtual hw is different, bios, motherboard, vdisk controller, disks name serial, nic ...

 

[frhack]

Hi, did you find out how to make it work. I have kind of the same problem (obsolete software is hardware bind and is still in use). For myself migrating from VMWare to Proxmox and its my last server that I have trouble with. and unfortunately the software vendor does not support that software anymore.

I solved the problem double checking for MS product reactivation.
The old telephone numbers was no more activated but I found a MS article giving the new phone numbers for my country

Here is the article:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb...g-office-9b016cd2-0811-4cb3-b896-5a6a13177713