Hi everybody
For a project in my organisation, I have to purchase new server hardware. For the project we have to purchase around 70 Servers running Windows Server 2012 R2. The Servers are going to run in a network without internet connection.
The computers are delivered by a contractor who installs the OS and some additional Software. For that reason, the activation has to take place in the factory of the contractor. However, the Software Licence itself will be provided directly by us. Our orgaisation has both, MAK and KMS keys. However, we would like to avoid giving our MAK to the contractor.
Now my questions:
1.If we want to use the MAK for activation: Is there a way for the contractor to activate the OS without having access to theMAK (e.g. by providing a "prepackaged" ISO of Windows that already contains the key)?
2.If we use the MAK: Is there a way of tracking which computers were acitvated using this key? (IP address, MAC address, hostname, etc)
3.I we want to use KMS: How is this possible in a Network without Internet? Or would we have to provide a KMS that is in both networks (internet and our closed LAN) and, hence, might be a security issue?
4.Is the KMS a dedicated Computer or could it be run by one of the already planned servers? How complex is it to setup such a server?
Running a KMS server would make everything more complicated for us, for that reason we try to avoid it. Does anybody have some experience with such a situation? What is a viable solution in such a case?
Thanks for your help!
Regards,
Ben