Is it possible to use a perpetual consumer product eg. "Office Home & Business 2019 (One-time purchase)” on an Azure VM?

Question

Hello Team,

I’m trying to confirm if it is possible to use either of the below perpetual consumer product

“Office Home & Business 2019 (One-time purchase)”
“Office Standard 2019 (One-time purchase)”

license on an Azure VM or not.
Unfortunately, the Office Team members I was able to engage regarding this, all do not have access to Azure VMs for testing:

"I don’t think feature updates have to do with not being able to run on Azure but I don’t believe any testing was done to see if perpetual consumer products would run successfully on Azure VMs. My suggestion would be to test it out and see if they do. "

and so I was referred to open this new Q and A with tag "azure-virtual-machines" in the hopes the VM team would either have a way to test this, OR confirm from prior knowledge that perpetual consumer products have no problem running on a VM. (This customer has a scenario where they can't use a M365 license)

thank you in advance for your time and expertise

*Here is my previous Q and A ask to the Office team for your reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/905152/is-it-possible-to-use-a-34one-time-purchase34-lice.html?childToView=909261#comment-909261

Answer 1

Hello, PeterThurwachterMINDTREELIMITED-2688!

Can I install a one-time purchase of Office 2019 on an Azure VM?
There are some complications with licensing in a cloud environment and for many traditional Microsoft products, activation is tied to specific hardware (like a motherboard). With a VM, your hardware configuration changes frequently (every time you deallocate your VM) and you would very quickly exhaust all of your product activations.

Additionally, software installations usually have specific licensing rules because of the increased level of public/user access. For this reason you would want to make sure that use in a cloud environment is explicitly called out in the product license.

For these reasons, you would not want to install a one-time purchase of Office on a VM.

Office 365 - Created for cloud
To address these issues, Office 365 has been designed specifically for the cloud. I know that you said that this isn't an option for your scenario but it would be the recommendation for anyone else who may find themselves in this situation.