How to prevent Office from re-activation if installed in VM

murada 1

Hi,

at my company we have the following problem: We bough an Office volume licence to install Office into on-prem VMs. We built a master image on one server which contains the activated Office installation. Now the problem: If we execute the image as VMs on others servers, the Office installation requires a re-activation, as the underlying hardware changed.

Is there any way around that? Re-activating Office everytime a VM starts is not an option for us.

Original question: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-prevent-office-from-re-activation-if/0c14d94d-e384-4b10-a22d-83aa7d13d24f?messageId=bbcc5613-5903-43d8-aa4e-443646f9ec9b

Charles Qi_MSFT 966 Reputation points

2022-10-19T09:33:06.617+00:00

Hi, @murada

This problem is related to Azure VMs. I will add a tag of azure-virtual-machines to this topic.
murada 1 Reputation point

2022-10-20T06:03:19.98+00:00

To clarify: We are not using Azure at all. We have on-prem VMs, but I guess it doesn't matter which VM provider is used, as the problem would exist anywhere.
Charles Qi_MSFT 966 Reputation points

2022-10-20T08:07:28.407+00:00

Hi @murada

Thank you for reply. Could you please let us know which version of Office is installed on the VM?
murada 1 Reputation point

2022-10-20T10:12:16.933+00:00

"Microsoft Office 2021 Standard" which is a setup just downloads the most current version of Office. If there are more specific details you need, let me know.
Thank you, for your help!
murada 1 Reputation point

2022-10-21T09:27:26.083+00:00

What Windows shows as the installed Office version is: "Microsoft Office LTSC Standard 2021 - en-us 16.0.14332.20400"
Charles Qi_MSFT 966 Reputation points

2022-10-25T06:54:47.913+00:00

Hi @murada

The activation of Office 2021 Standard is based on the hardware. When the underlying hardware changed users need to re-activate the product.
murada 1 Reputation point

2022-10-25T06:59:29.333+00:00

Hi. Yes, that is the problem. My question is, how do I solve it? There must be a way of activating Office for VMs with changing hardware. It would be absurd to buy a license and then crack the product to be able to use it. If there is a "not standard" license we need to buy that is totally fine. But there is no documentation available that tells which one to use.
Charles Qi_MSFT 966 Reputation points

2022-11-03T10:08:57.887+00:00

Hi, @murada

This feature is by design. To address your concerns, we suggest you submit your idea and feedback via feedback

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How to prevent Office from re-activation if installed in VM