Azure VM failed to in-place upgrade

Question

Azure VM on WIndows Server 2008R2, when upgrade to Windows Server 2012R2, error "Windows cannot find the Microsoft Software License Terms. Make sure the installation sources are valid and restart the installation." popup.

Answer 1

@Victor

I believe your issue is related to licensing.

The upgrade media provided by Azure requires the VM to be configured for Windows Server volume licensing. This is the default behavior for any Windows Server VM that was installed from a generalized image in Azure. If the VM was imported into Azure, then it might need to be converted to volume licensing to use the upgrade media provided by Azure. To confirm the VM is configured for volume license activation follow these steps to configure the appropriate KMS client setup key. If the activation configuration was changed, then follow these steps to verify connectivity to Azure KMS service.

Please check and retry following the steps here. If possible, we recommend creating a new VM with the desired OS version and migrating your data and applications.

---

If you still have questions, please let us know in the "comments" and we would be happy to help you. Comment is the fastest way of notifying the experts.

If the answer has been helpful, we appreciate hearing from you and would love to help others who may have the same question. Accepting answers helps increase visibility of this question for other members of the Microsoft Q&A community.

Thank you for helping to improve Microsoft Q&A!

Answer 2

Hi, even not using media provided by Azure, got the same error.

Also, if upgrade to Windows Server 2016, "Setup has failed to validatethe product key" returned.