What happens if I continue to use Windows 10 Pro deployed to AzureVM without certifying it?

Question

I am thinking of deploying Windows 10 on AzureVM.
I have read the official Azure documentation and understand that I need to have a license agreement that allows multi-tenant hosting, and that I need to activate the subscription with AzureAD.
However, I did not understand what would happen if I continued to use the VM without the above authentication.

Would it be treated as a license violation? Or will the VM become unusable in the process？
can you please tell me.Thank you.

Answer 1

@石井 一輝 ,

A brief overview of licenses
To answer your question first I'm going to talk briefly about the difference between Windows Server licenses and Windows 10 licenses.

Windows Server is licensed based on the number of cores, not the number of users. If you set up a VM you'll see the price go up as you increase VCPUs but the monthly rate makes it very straight forward.

Windows 10, on the other hand, is licensed per user and licenses are separated by use (dev/test vs production). In a cloud environment where there are potentially many different users this creates some complexities when it comes to licensing.

Windows 10 cloud options
(Edit - Updated) There are two primary scenarios for Windows 10 use: Development or test workloads and production workloads. What you will use your VM for determines which type of license you would want to look into.

1) Development and test - Windows Client
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/client-images
For development and testing you can use Windows client (Windows 7/8.1/10 Enterprise N). For single user/VM applications for those who do not already have a Visual Studio subscription, I would start by looking at a monthly Visual Studio Professional subscription for a Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test offer. You can always talk to sales to see what is a good match for you.

2) Production - Multitenant
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/windows-desktop-multitenant-hosting-deployment
For production environments you would want to look at multitenant licenses which come with a variety of subscriptions including Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Windows Enterprise E3/E5 (as well as some licenses for education institutions and business oriented virtual desktops). It's worth talking to sales if this is something you are interested in.

The original question
Hopefully all of this makes it more clear when I say that you need to use the software as described in the license. If you don't, you would obviously be violating the license but I can't think of a reason to do this. If your goal is just to use a Windows 10 VM again I would really reach out to sales and see what options work best for you.