I have been playing with VMWare and Windows and have noticed that some images tend to ask for license validation again and some do not. I have made sure that I have a valid license handy to play with but I might want to take an image and modify it for testing purposes. I might want to run the image on a different machine to test an IO system or test a new graphic interface. Even though I have a license, it some times prompts me for revalidation.
In VMWare there is a control file tagged with the .vmx extension. It saves data like the MAC address of the box or a uuid generated for the VM machine that created it. I have found that you can fool the Windows instance to think it is on the same machine by changing the following parameters.
Ethernet0.addressType = “generated”
Ethernet1.addressType = “generated”
uuid.location = “56 4d 60 58 ac 4d 2d 60-a4 81 7f ef a3 89 c5 ca”
uuid.bios = “56 4d 60 58 ac 4d 2d 60-a4 81 7f ef a3 89 c5 ca”
ethernet0.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:89:c5:ca”
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = “0”
ethernet1.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:89:c5:d4”
ethernet1.generatedAddressOffset = “10”
I am not sure if this adheres to the legality of the license but it does stop me from having to make the dreaded phone call to Redmond just to port my license to another laptop running in an VM image. It seems that I should be able to run the image on my laptop or desktop as long as I am not running it on both. I am typically not running it more than a few hours every once and a while for testing purposes. I should not spend more time on licenseing and phone calls that I do on testing. Because of this issue, I typically play and test on Linux because there are not the same licensing issues and restrictions. Yet another example of “easy to do business with” getting in the way of innovation.