Upgrade KMS from W2012R2 into W2019 keep counters

Question

Having a W2012R2 server, with a KMS host application running.
Done an inplace upgrade to W2019. OS is fine.

After activating the KMS host with a new license key, all the counters showed up being zero.

Can the uprade and activation of KMS be done while maintaining the counters?

Prior the upgrade the slmgr /dli output showed :

License Status: Licensed
Key Management Service is enabled on this machine
Current count: 50
Listening on Port: 1688
DNS publishing enabled
KMS priority: Normal Key Management Service cumulative requests received from clients
Total requests received: 168718
Failed requests received: 38993
Requests with License Status Unlicensed: 0
Requests with License Status Licensed: 128058
Requests with License Status Initial grace period: 209
Requests with License Status License expired or Hardware out of tolerance: 10
Requests with License Status Non-genuine grace period: 0
Requests with License Status Notification: 1448

After the inplace upgrade and activation of the KMS host, all these values were shown to be zero.

Answer 1

Hello Mike,

Unfortunately, when you perform an in-place upgrade from Windows Server 2012 R2 to Windows Server 2019, the Key Management Service (KMS) activation data does not persist through the upgrade process. This means that after the upgrade, the KMS host will need to reinitialize its licensing counters, and the counts will start over at zero. The KMS service needs to start the accumulation of activation requests again.

Best Regards,

Hania Lian

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