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We've recently signed an agreement with Microsoft in order to become part of the SPLA program, wich let's us rent different licenses of MS products.

But we must before regularize our situation with the actual server licenses in the datacenter. Related to this we have two questions that maybe some admin knows:

  • The first one is that we have been told to look for the PartNumber of the installed version in the official sticker (you know, that thing with the hologram) attached to the server. We can't directly see this stickers because they are attached to the servers installed on the datacenter's racks. Is there any way of obtain this partnumber through some software or tool inside terminal server, for example?.

  • We have also been told to start paying our OEM licenses as SPLA licenses. We can't put the SPLA license in the OEM computer. Is there any way to change the active license (OEM) without reinstalling the operative system (To SPLA)?

We have a little mess here. We are a little company hosting but we are talking of 60-70 servers aprox.

Thanks a lot, really.

[EDIT] We've found a tool that gets all product keys in a network segment: ProduKey by Nirsoft. http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

Jacob
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  • possible duplicate of [Can you help me with my software licensing issue?](http://serverfault.com/questions/215405/can-you-help-me-with-my-software-licensing-issue) – MDMarra Jun 17 '13 at 12:01

2 Answers2

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Is there any way of obtain this partnumber through some software or tool inside terminal server, for example?.

No chance. THis is way tooo detached from the hardware. IT pretty much is a made up number.

What you can do is account based on computer / host names, and have the part number as optional column in your spreadsheet.

Is there any way to change the active license (OEM) without reinstalling the operative system (To SPLA)?

"no need to". As long as your accounting is proper things are ok. MS is in general interested in you not paying less than you have to. That said, I dont realy like OEM software - you never know what modifications the OEM people did.

TomTom
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The PartNumber from MS is always in the form "X##-#####", where the "#" are numbers. I don't know of any tool that reports this number, I don't think the OS even knows it in the first place.

The ProductID is a completely different number and is based on your ProductKey, the Product Key is the five groups of five alpha-num characters that you need to install Windows. The Product Key can't be reversed out of newer versions of Windows, but could old versions. The ProductID is available in System Properties (groups of 5-3-7-5 numbers).

Newer versions of Windows (Vista/7/Server 2008/R2) all have a "Change Product Key" button on the System Properties page. XP/2003 have an official process. You should not be running anything older than that.

Chris S
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