Universe’s Tech Blog

With the imminent arrival of Vista Business and Enterprise additions, Microsoft has dropped a nasty little surprise on system admins. Windows Vista sports a little feature called Volume Activation 2.0.

Yes you read correctly – Volume ACTIVATION. Apparently, every volume licensed product to date has been using Volume Activation 1.0, which bypassed the activation process once the correct key was entered.

Volume licenced serial numbers have been the mainstay of pirated copies of Microsoft products – they may fail the online validation test, but they keep running once installed.

Every volume product except Windows Vista and Longhorn Server will keep Volume Activation 1.0. Microsoft has moved to Volume Activation 2.0 for two reasons:

* Close significant piracy loopholes (Volume License keys represent the majority of keys involved in Windows piracy)
* Improve the volume customer experience.

The first reason I can live with, but the second is flat-out ridiculous. The “volume customer experience” is the joy of having volume licensed products and NEVER having to activate them. When you’re dealing with hundreds if not thousands of individual installations of Windows and Office, not having to double-handle each one by activating it makes life a lot easier.

But, it’s a brave new world and it seems that the good times for software pirates are over. Now, instead of a Volume License product key, Vista administrators have two choices – the Multiple Activation Key (MAK) or the Key Management Service (KMS).

Multiple Key Activation activates individual machines or groups of machines using a direct internet or phone connection to Microsoft, and they have a limited amount of activations built-in. To increase the activation limit, you have to ring a Microsoft Activation Center. For Australia, the numbers are 02 9870 2131 or 1800 642 008.

There are two options for using MAK activation – proxy and independent. Proxy activation involved multiple computers connecting to Microsoft simultaneously via one connection. This option is not available yet, and will be made so via the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT), due for release in 2007. Independent activation is just that – each computer connects to Microsoft individually for Vista activation.

Key Management Service allows businesses to administer activation in-house. One Vista workstation runs KMS, and all the other Vista workstations (installed with KMS Volume License keys) connect to that workstation for activation. To prevent someone bringing in their home computer, installing KMS-activated Vista and leaving again, each KMS-activated installation of Vista reconnects to the KMS host every 180 days to renew activation. If a KMS installation of Vista cannot connect to the host for thirty days, Vista goes into Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM).

The KMS host has to be activated before it can activate other machines, using the KMS volume key assigned to you. Each KMS key can use used on two computers up to 10 times — anything more than this and it’s another call to Microsoft. At the moment a KMS host has to be running Vista or Longhorn Server, but in 2007 Windows 2003 will be able to host KMS as well.

And two more pieces of bad news. Firstly, KMS is only available for businesses with at least 25 Vista machines connected to the corporate network. Secondly, if you create an image using MAK activation, every new computer you setup from that image has to be individually activated – you can’t activate an image and propagate it. Each clone counts as a completely new machine requiring activation.

So is this the end for pirates? There are ways of cracking Windows activation, as pirated copies of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 attest to. However, Volume Activation 2.0 certainly looks set to put an end to casual Windows piracy, made so easy by Volume Activation 1.0. On the downside, life for system admins just got harder, with another layer of administrative complexity.

So much for improving the volume customer experience…