Microsoft currently have two KMS clients: one in the Operating System (since Windows Vista and Server 2008) and most recently one for Office 2010. The environment I’m working in already has an existing KMS server which is registred in DNS and has a channel B activation key installed and managed by the organisations Systems Integrator (SI). As part of our project we planned to implement a second KMS server with the Windows 7 and Office 2010 activation keys installed which would be managed by a different team within the organisation.

As per the TechNet page on choosing the right volumen license key, each channel group activates the downstream group:

Knowing that the channel B key would activate the client OS but not Office, the question I had was:

“How would the KMS clients handle having two activation servers with different activation keys?”

I had a dicussion on a mailing list at Microsoft and was pleased to find out that the client’s autodiscovery behaved as I hoped they would which is:

This was good to confirm as there was concern that the KMS client would activate the OS agianst one server and then fail to activate Office and leave the workstation in an undesireable state.

DNS was configured using the steps outlined in the Volume Activation Deployment Guide and tested using:

nslookup
set q=srv
._VLMVS._TCP

Both KMS servers were returned.

A quick check of the respective KMS clients (on 64-bit Win7) using the following:

cscript "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\ospp.vbs" /dhistorykms
csscript "C:\Windows\System32\slmgr.vbs" /dli

confirmed that activation was working as expected.

#Winning ;-)