Windows – VMware: Make applications see Windows VM as bare metal

licensingvirtualizationvmware-esxiwindows

In a virtual environment using VMware, I want to setup a Windows license server. Unfortunately, the vendor's license server refuses to run on a VM; it must be installed on a physical machine.

Since we have no physical Windows servers and don't want to have them: is it possible to set up a virtual environment which is mostly undetected by applications? How do applications detect that they are running on a virtual box?

I want to emphasize that we are not attempting to circumvent licensing requirements. This is just about avoiding cost for maintenance and energy for another mostly useless single point of failure.

Best Answer

Unfortunately, I think there's too many different bits of virtual hardware that get stamped as VMware to completely mask the fact that it's a VM, and not a ton of ways to change what's getting presented.

However, there is some hope for tricking this specific application, if you can figure out what it's keying on and hide that information.

If it's keying on the hard drive's model info, you could try a directly mapped disk instead of a VMDK.

If it's looking for an 00:0c MAC address, easy fix.

First thing I'd try, though, would be to change the Product and Manufacturer strings exposed in the VM to use what's on the host instead - if I had to guess at what some bad licensing software would check, this would be my first guess.

Set SMBIOS.reflectHost = TRUE:

reflecthost

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