AVMA feature on Hyper-V not activating VM license

Question

I have a few Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2016 running on Microsoft Hyper-V Windows 2012 R2 Datacenter, and some of those VMs are showing as Evaluation licenses and are not activating automatically as per the AVMA feature on Hyper-V. Any suggestions on what can be causing this or where I can look into further?

Answer 1

An evaluation cannot be activated via AVMA. As a workaround you can try a kms key as intermediate step.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/kmsclientkeys

(assuming a 2016 DataCenter guest)

Dism /online /Set-Edition:ServerDatacenter /AcceptEula /ProductKey:CB7KF-BWN84-R7R2Y-793K2-8XDDG

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/automatic-vm-activation#avma-keys
then after reboot do (AVMA)
slmgr /ipk TMJ3Y-NTRTM-FJYXT-T22BY-CWG3J
slmgr /ato

Also note: if the DataCenter host is 2012 R2 then the highest guest that can use AVMA is 2012 R2
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/automatic-vm-activation#system-requirements

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