And licensing doesn't differentiate between the original Windows 10 install and other VMs.

Otherwise, using Device Guard which depends on Hyper-V hypervisor would be in breach of the licensing terms as the host OS is not really meant to be used as a VM. It still gets presented to you as a physical installation, but it's not.ĭoes technically a VM in architecture of a Microsoft OS component itself really means a VM in terms of licensing? I would doubt it. Once you install the Hyper-V role, your OS installation is now a VM.

If this was the case, Hyper-V on Windows 10 OEM wouldn't be allowed. You can run a type2 hypervisor on the OEM OS. You can try searching for the various post but I have read thru the 26 pages of the Windows 10 OEM ELUA for that post back then.then answer is that you are not allowed or supposed to use OEM Windows licenses even if you are running a type-1 hypervisor on the PC. Some OEM licenses sticker have the product key written, else you can call M$ for assistance with the activation in the activation page (you can use the 36 digit code as other installation using the same OEM media will give you the same 25 digit activation assistance code which then requires the same 36 digit 'phone' activation code). I can confirm that Windows 10 does not 'see' the embedded OEM key when running virtualized (at least inside VirtualBox)

I accidentally deleted the file I had stored the extracted OEM key in so I wasn't able to try that. I wasn't able to boot the Windows VHD I created using VirtualBox because UEFI support is beta. I ended up using an OEM Windows 7 Pro key off a decommissioned desktop that was laying around to get it to activate.

Create windows 10 vm virtualbox