Windows Activation sideeffect when upgrading CPU ?

[adsboel 9]

Hi Guys,

 

Have been tinkering in the hopelap (doesnt feel like home yet) during the Holidays and win8 and hyper-v core seems to finally working together as an effective team - smooth - and I am just getting the last architecture into place. The only big fight I have left is to get shared vdhx to work in the simplest form (any hints?)

 

Anyways, I was moving VM's from my old N36L and onto the new hyper-v server and every bloody vm needed re-activation. very annoying, but sortof not a surprising given the totally different platforms (chipset, chip etc).

 

The big question now is, while waiting for a Xeon 1260L for my Gen8...  will a CPU upgrade from Celeron to Xeon on gen8 also trigger everything single VM to be required to be re-activated again?

[ikon 438]

In a way, I am a little surprised that you had to reactivate all your VMs. After all, VMs are all about Hardware Abstration. You would think that the only thing that would need reactivation would be the host OS, since it runs the VMs. It should not be a case of the OS' inside the VMs seeing different hardware, because they shouldn't.

[adsboel 9]

VT is not about hardware abstraction, its about hardware sharing and memory protection at hardware level.

 

The virtual can see which CPU it is running on. In old days, VM's were emulators, today they are not.

[ikon 438]

Guess that shows how far out of date I am. Only thing is, if it's not about HALs anymore, why do people have so much trouble with video cards in VMs?

[adsboel 9]

HAL is the layer between hardware and the kernel, but these days with hardware virtualization, I believe the HAL communicates with the physical hardware and not with some emulated virtual hardware as it would ages ago.

 

I think everyone remembers how slow virtual pc was before VT- ...

 

Regardless, I found my old VM were regged on volume license (msdn thingy) and easily re-activated. Its just an annoying risk factor.

 

Brian

[adsboel 9]

update: windows activation are unaffected by cpu upgrade

[ikon 438]

Good to know.