Failed to activate the software license workaround #VMware #View
January 27, 2011 
Sean Crookston 
Recently I was setting up a VMware View in my home lab and came across this error, which I had seen before. The error occurs because a KMS server is not properly setup to activate the Windows 7 linked clones. As result I could not access any of the linked clones I created .
I don’t need these machines for any reason other then to play around with different options for linked clone pools so I began looking for a work around to this issue and found one here. In the base image you created, you would have installed the VMware View Agent. On that system you will find two registry keys of interest that you may want to modify. As stated, this is not supported by VMware but may be good for proof of concept or demo purposes as getting a KMS server can sometimes be difficult to get set up in certain environments.
Both keys are located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vmware-viewcomposer-ga
The first key, AllowActivateMAKLicense, defaults to zero and tells quickprep to look for a KMS server to activate. By setting this to 1 quickprep will use MAK to activate.
The second key, SkipLicenseActivation , defaults to zero as well. By setting this to 1 View will no longer require the guest operating system to be activated in order to have users connection to the View desktops. This was of most interest to me as I wanted to ensure any settings or testing I had done was working, but couldn’t connect because of the error.
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Great to see you leveraging our Knowledgebase and adding to the collective wisdom out there!
Its probably worth noting that the SkipLicenseActivation key seems to get reset to 0 during an upgrade of the View agent.