OEM Licenses And Automated Deployment

I was at a Microsoft session that was supposed to be attended by the best and brightest of MS technology administrators and consultants in the country.  I was stunned when one of them asked what the situation was with cloning machines that were licensed with OEM licenses.  This makes me wonder what their person’s employers have been doing for the last 10 years!  Is that a “random” license audit I hear making its way to his office?!?!?!

Here’s the short story about OEM licensing.  They come with a PC that you buy from the likes of HP, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, etc.  They are cheap.  The reason they are cheap is that they are TIED to that machine.  If the machine dies, the license dies.  If you dispose of the machine, you dispose of the license.  You cannot transfer that OEM license to another machine.  This license requires that you use the license key from the sticker on the box.  This is important because an OEM license install requires activation with MS.

If you are going to use a cloning mechanism (Ghost, WDS, ADS or even RIS) for OEM builds then you must use an OEM media kit and not use the unattended feature for the license key.  This will mean that your build will continue in an almost unattended manner … it will only pause to wait for someone to enter the license key from the box.  Beware!  PC resellers have been known to do very strange things to the setup files on their media kits.  You may have to do some black magic to make the media kit more generic to support other PC specs.

An option for complete unattended installs is to buy an “OEM upgrade” from Microsoft.  This allows you to use a single media kit and single license key for all machines that you have purchased with an OEM license.  The advantages:

• Single media kit that is generic and requires no black magic.
• A single license key
• Easy license management via MVLS
• A completely unattended setup of your machines.

You can even go one step further and save some more money by buying a “Desktop Core CAL”.  This includes the OEM upgrade and some other licenses, e.g. Office Professional, Windows Server, Exchange, SharePoint Server and SMS.