Ok, I'm new to KMS. Up 'til now we have activated all of our Windows Servers using MAK. KMS seems to be a better way to go when having a large number of servers online. I installed the KMS services and activated a few servers within the domain and all went well. I tested out changing from MAK to KMS with the following:
slmgr /ipk <setup key>
slmgr /skms <kmsserver>:<port number>
slmgr /ato
This seems to have gone well so far. Although after looking around online at different KMS articles, I am beginning to worry that my count may not be increasing as it should but that could simply be general paranoia of a new application. Most of our Windows Server 2008 R2 builds were done with an image over WDS and I'm not sure what options were in sysprep [ex: /generalize, etc]. Anyway, I'll figure that out later and post a new thread if that becomes an issue.
My main concern right now is that I would like a way to see how many servers are online that are connecting to the KMS server for activation. This is important when it comes to reporting for the SPLA. It appears that there are a couple of values given that could represent this. slmgr /dli on the KMS server shows me:
Key Management Service is enabled on this machine
Current count: 10
Key Management Service cumulative requests received from clients
Total requests received: 27
I've read that the Current count value will never show above 50. It is simply for the threshold of activation. So, this leaves me assuming that Total requests received would be how many I have online that have contacted the KMS server.
In the interest of SPLA reporting, I have the following questions.
1. If I activate a server then 5 minutes later activate the same server again, will that count increase by 1?
2. If I shutdown 5 servers and the 7 days is reached at which each server would contact the KMS server again for activation, would that count decrease by 5? I would assume not as it's cumulative but also the KMS server has been contacted by clients that are no longer contacting. If it got 27 requests today and 7 days later it only received 22 requests, shouldn't that be view-able somewhere?
As you all can tell, I am new to this and I have learned a great deal about AD, KMS and Windows DNS today. Any light you can shed on the KMS questions would be great! I just don't understand the advantage to using KMS if it doesn't have some reporting built into it.
I even gave VAMT a try today but I keep running into WMI errors and it seems to be more work than logging onto a few servers and running a couple commands.