VM Licensing

[tmorrisditto]

I searched through the Q&A and did not find anything the satisfied my use case. I want to know how many keys I need to buy for our case or if I need to change our layout to better utilize the keys. Currently we use Packer to create an image for our VMs. That image could then be used to spin up up to 5 VMs. I am wondering if we can activate during image creation, or if we should activate upon VM creation and deactivate on VM termination. Our image would be updated monthly so the number of vms running off that image wont change but the VMs would change depending on update status or fault tolerances/scaling.

[waydabber]

Hi @tmorrisditto - sorry for responding late.

I think you should activate/deactivate during creation and termination. I am not entirely sure how Paddle (the 3rd party licensing component) behaves with VMs, but with real Macs license activations seem to be tied to the MAC addresses of the primary network adapter of the machine.

Note: you can deactivate or reset activations with the key using CLI even after destroying the VM. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/wiki/License-management-scripted