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In my infrastructure I have a Windows 2016 server with the "Volume Activation Services" role running and a while ago it has the host key that we got from Microsoft. Now we're going to migrate the server to W2019 and I want to activate the licensing feature there too, using the same host key of course... But I'm not going to shut down W2016 just yet. It's going to continue like this for a while longer. Can both KMS coexist? And both with the same host key? Or should there only be one who has the published DNS? Everything is on the same domain, same network
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Hello,
Yes they both can coexist and both can use the same key. The KMS Host key should allow 6 different machines to activate.
Both machines will register with DNS and handle activations for the clients.
Clients that have activated with the KMS host w2016 will attempt to reach that KMS host first prior to querying the DNS host for a KMS host.
Depending on the number of KMS clients in your environment, will determine the counts for each KMS host. Since the two KMS hosts maintain separate counts you may need to point some of the KMS clients to the KMS host w2019 to achieve the needed count to activate clients.
Darrell