Hi,BackgroundI work as a consultant for an engineering firm which develops control systems. As part of this work I take images of existing PC's and import into VmWare for some R&D type work prior to the approval of projects. (After project is approved customers buy hardware and licensing)QuestionAfter importing the image into VMware I need to reactivate the PC within 3 days. Before reactivating I want to change the associated license key to an MSDN OS license. Is this possible if the initial installation was from a Retail CD ?Essentially can you only use MSDN OS license keys with installations from the MSDN CD's ? ThanksFinbarr

No, your MSDN license keys should be able to applied to the retail media, unless you have an MSDN license that is for volume licensed environment. MSDN keys are only supposed to be used for non-production use, but this looks like it falls into that category. And, it doesn't sound like once you are done that the virtual machines are going to go back into production.Of course, this does not address any third-party software that might be on that box, such as firewall, anti-virus, etc. You most likely don't have to activate those, but they each have their individual licenses that you need to conform to.tgc

clarification question:i, too, was hoping to virtualize a production instance of Team Foundation Server into a VM in order to test things like service pack installations, template customizations, etc. Is there a license issue with this, or does this also fall under non-production development work that we can do per our MSDN subscription?