Windows 2019 VM activation

So what have I been up to lately?

I’ve been taking a look at Windows Server, once again. Normally I do all my experimenting etc on Linux. But now I got the ability to use some Windows server 2019 datacenter licenses, so why not give it a try an deploy a small Windows cluster?
Ofcourse the hardware of choice are beefed HP T620 Thin Clients.

After deploying Hyper-V, I discovered Windows has this interesting thing called VM activation. I was always wondering how retail keys behaved when you enter them in your VMs, turns out you don’t. I never gave it a thought while deploying Volume license keys over VMware infrastructures, but turns out that on Hyper-V your host can license the guest!

More about this can be found on the following page:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started-19/vm-activation-19

But it basically boils down to this command prompt command (Windows 2019 datacenter):

slmgr /ipk YOUR-WINDOWS-VERSION-KEY-HERE

Activation status can be checked with:

slmgr /dlv

Fyi, more info on slmgr can be found here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/activation-slmgr-vbs-options