Hello, I have had some problems the last month which have led me to restore the server from the backup image. In both instances after restoring the server the OS had become un-activated and automatically reactivated itself.
What I would like to know is whether this happened because of hardware changes in the server or if it is normal for this to happen upon restoration.
In the first instance its understandable since the server was a replacement server sent from lenovo as the original one had malfunctioned and the technician was not able to fix it. They sent me a new one with a slightly more powerful cpu and the motherboard was the same but had a new bios (version 3.60) So I could see why perhaps the necessity for reactivation
Later, I added an lsi RAID card and wanted to move the system disk to a raid 1 mirror. I tried with every tool I could find to migrate from my SATA SSD to the larger RAID volume but could never get it to boot (the system uses uefi bios Im guessing thats why I couldnt migrate the disk) Finally I opted to simply restore the system from backup with the new disk as a target for system disk.
Restoration process went well, and I booted up but then noticed in the Server info that windows was "unactivated" again. The only thing that changed this time was the new system disk.
The thing is I have a limited number of activations as the school that I work for has a software assurance donation from microsoft which provides a MAK with 10 activations possible so I would like to know if I should expect that everytime a server is restored from backup a re-activation will be necessary.
I searched but have not been able to find definitive documentation on this subject so would appreciate if anyone could let me know how this need for re-activation is triggered (aside from changing to a different computer etc.)
thanks
Luis