Yes well I will try to give you as much information as I have from all the email exchanges with Dell ProSupport. The bottom-line is that YES you can have unlimited number of guest VMs running on your DataCenter edition 2012 hyper-v host but if you're going install any other OS on them other than DataCenter itself you will not be able to use the Product Activation key which came with the host. So we install Datacenter 2012 on all our guests as well and simply activate them with the same key which was on our Hyper-V host. By all means you can go ahead and install 2008 or 2008R2 server OS on the guests but also be prepared to buy licensing for it separately or have some other arrangement with either Dell or Microsoft. I will post replies from Dell below - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windows Server 2012 does indeed have a COA, on the R720 I believe it will be on the top surface in the front left corner. Unlike 2008R2, there is no longer separate POSE and VOSE keys – the COA key will activate both.   The virtual machines (OEM or otherwise) can be moved between hardware freely (assuming the servers have adequate hosting capacity for them – which Datacenter ensures) If the you are moving Standard VMs around, they should be activated with the Standard key. The confusion around the COA may stem from the fact that they are no longer issued for Win8. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ That’s correct – you can’t create a Standard VM with a DC key. The DC license can host standard VMs however. The Standard VMs can be migrated to the DC host if they were created on a standard OS previously, otherwise, I believe they can be created under the Standard license if a Standard key is used. Under the terms of the EULA, it is up to you to us your own keys to exercise downgrade and down edition rights, but this part should have the Standard 2012 media and keys: 8J5GV ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   If you have any more questions let me know. Cheers  
Hi,  We recently purchased new Dell kit including 3 x PowerEdge R720 servers and 2 x Equallogic SANs. We are running Hyper-V 2012 as hypervisor. The 3 Dell servers came with Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition preinstalled and pre-activated. We know that Datacenter gives us the ability to run unlimited VMs.   We’re running a few VMs with Server 2012 Standard installed. My question is which product key should I use to activate/license the Server 2012 Standard guests? I’ve tried using the Server 2012 Datacenter edition keys which were on the Dell Hosts but failed.   Does anyone have any ideas?
Hyper-V 2012 guest VM activation