Custom Windows Server Standard VM on Azure: It Works, But Is It Licensing Compliant?
Hi everyone, I wanted to share a recent technical experience where I successfully created and deployed a Windows Server Standard VM on Azure using a fully custom image. I started by downloading the official Windows Server Standard Evaluation ISO. I created a Generation 2 VM in Hyper-V and completed the OS setup using the Desktop Experience edition. Once the configuration was done, I ran sysprep to generalize the image. After that, I converted the disk from VHDX to VHD in fixed format, which turned out to be a critical step because Azure does not accept dynamic disks. The resulting file was around 127 GB, so I uploaded it to a premium storage account container to ensure performance. From there, I created a Generation 2 image in Azure and deployed a new VM from it. I then activated the Standard edition with a valid product key. Everything worked smoothly, but I’m still unsure whether this method is fully compliant with Microsoft’s licensing policies. Specifically, I’m trying to understand if going from an Evaluation ISO to sysprep, upload, deployment, and activation in Azure is a valid and compliant scenario when not using BYOL with Software Assurance or a CSP license. Has anyone gone through this process or has any insights on the compliance aspect? Thanks in advance for any guidance or clarification.🌟 Community Spotlight – Nicola Delfino
In this edition of Community Spotlight, we're highlighting some outstanding contributions from the Microsoft communities. This time, we’re featuring https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoladelfino/, Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. Getting hands-on with Azure networking can be difficult - the network may not behave in the way you anticipate! Nicola has created and been maintaining a Hub and Spoke playground repository. https://github.com/nicolgit/hub-and-spoke-playground over the past few years. The Hub and Spoke playground is a well-documented, easy-to-deploy network topology for testing, studying, and inventing network configurations. https://github.com/nicolgit/hub-and-spoke-playground A collection of BICEP/ARM templates that deploys on Azure a hub & spoke net topology aligned with Microsoft Enterprise scale landing zone ref architecture to use as a playground for testing and studying. As bonus, many scenarios with step-by-step solutions for studying and learning are also available If you need to learn, get hands-on and see potential relevant architecture patterns when it comes to Azure networking, this repository is worth a look!
