How to manage Windows licenses for virtual machines on your Hosted Private Cloud infrastructure – Support Guides

Learn how to manage Windows licenses for your virtual machines hosted on your Hosted Private Cloud infrastructure.

NOTE: OVHcloud allows you to ease the management and billing of your Windows licenses by allowing you to tell us which virtual machines require the use of a license.

However, you remain responsible for the accuracy of the data you provide to us, and OVHcloud cannot be held liable for any unauthorized use of a Windows system on your part.

Requirements

Windows licenses activated in your OVHcloud Control Panel

Instructions

List virtual machines with a license

You can quickly check which virtual machines in your infrastructure are licensed via the OVHcloud API:

GET /dedicatedCloud/{serviceName}/datacenter/{datacenterId}/vmLicensed

Return example:

[
    {
        "vmId": 1074,
        "name": "my-win2019-vm",
        "guestOsFamily": "windows2019srv_64Guest",
        "license": "windows 2019 Standard Core"
    }
]

Verify the license of a virtual machine

You can check the license currently associated with one of your virtual machines via the OVHcloud API:

GET /dedicatedCloud/{serviceName}/datacenter/{datacenterId}/vm/{vmId}

If no license is attached to it, the license field value will be null.

Return example:

{
    // ...
    "guestOsFamily": "windows2019srv_64Guest",
    "license": "windows 2019 Standard"
}

Update the license of a virtual machine

You can update the license associated with one of your virtual machines via the OVHcloud API:

POST /dedicatedCloud/{serviceName}/datacenter/{datacenterId}/vm/{vmId}/setLicense

Virtual machines deployed from VMware content libraries are automatically attached to a corresponding Windows license.

NOTE: To avoid the incorrect allocation of a Windows license on a virtual machine, the API call above will return an error in the case where the virtual machine has been configured for a different operating system from your vSphere interface.

You can resolve this by changing the VM settings, or you can choose to ignore this error by passing the option bypassGuestOsFamilyCheck.

Unlicense a virtual machine

You can delete the license associated with one of your virtual machines via the OVHcloud API:

POST /dedicatedCloud/{serviceName}/datacenter/{datacenterId}/vm/{vmId}/removeLicense

Go further

For more information and tutorials, please see our other Hosted Private Cloud support guides or explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.