Activating Dynamincs AX 2012 VMs deployed to Azure from LCS

Our company has retired all of our lab hosts which we used to have internally which means thet we need to have our lab servers on Microsoft Azure. To install the servers we use LCS (Lice Cycle Services) which deploys a VM in our Azure Subscription. The problem is that the VM is not activated, which on an internal server would require a product key and a Windows Server License… When running VMs internally we used to handle this by rearming the VMs 3 times which gives us a total of 180 days and then set up a new one which was a little hassle but it worked. But since we now have deployed VMs on Azure there is actually a license included in the Azure VM which means that there is no need to run a server which is not activated. Here is a short description on how to activate the AX VM…

  1. Install the new VM on Microsoft Azure using LCS
  2. Log into the the server using RDP (the logon info is in LCS)
  3. Start an elevated command prompt
  4. Find the edition of the VM by running this command:

    DISM /online /Get-CurrentEdition

    We get: Current Edition : ServerDatacenterEval

  5. Find out which edition you can upgrade to by running:

    DISM /online /Get-TargetEditions

    We get: Target Edition : ServerDatacenter

    This means that you can upgrade from the evaluation edition of datacenter edition to the full version of datacenter edition. Now we need a license key… Microsoft uses Automatic Virtual Machine Activation to license the VMs in Azure… This means that if the host is activated (which it hopefully is Smile ) the guest gets activated but to use this feature the guest VM still need a product key. The keys are available on Technet.

  6. Use the correct key to activate the VM by running this:

    DISM /online /Set-Edition:ServerDatacenter /ProductKey:XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX /AcceptEULA

  7. Restart the VM and verify that is is not using Evaluation Edition anymore

    image

That’s all for today

Links:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303421.aspx

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