Licensing Issue When Restoring Azure Windows 2022 VM On-Premises or Another Cloud

[YouGotServered]

Hey all,
This is more of a Microsoft issue / question, but I think a lot of Veeam users may face this and wanted to see if anyone had any ideas.

I'm testing restoring Azure VMs on premises / alternate clouds. I can think of a couple of use cases for this, but it's mostly just to get a feel of what is possible and what isn't.

With Windows Server 2022, Microsoft released a new edition - "Azure Datacenter". When you restore a VM with Azure Datacenter, the VM detects that it isn't on Azure or Azure Stack hardware and deactivates. You're greeted with a message at server boot telling you this.

The VM seems to work ok otherwise, but I'm not sure if MS has or will bake any auto-shutdown features into this like they do with Windows Evaluation editions of Windows Server. Either way, I wouldn't want my end users seeing this if they have to log onto the servers for any reason (RDS?).

I used all of my normal DISM commands that I've used in the past to convert between Eval, Standard, and Datacenter, but none work, throwing "Error 50", due to the upgrade being unable to proceed because of an invalid target edition. Running DISM.exe /Online /Get-TargetEditions says no available target editions, and using the generic KMS setup key for server 2022 Datacenter in the GUI also returns an error.

So - my question is - does anyone know how to convert these VMs to actually be able to use properly on-premises (or on another cloud) once restored, or no? Do we just need to plan for this scenario in advance and bring our own licenses to Azure, and not use Azure native licensing?

Thanks everyone!

[johan.h]

Yes, Azure Edition is designed, and more importantly, licensed to only work in Azure or on Azure Stack HCI only. I imagine the logic for this is similar to how OEM licensing works, as the VM can detect the BIOS underneath and then will only work when the hardware is the correct type.

The simple option - download a trial of Azure Stack HCI as the hypervisor and see if that works. It supports single node deployment now.

Another option would be to completely swap out the boot layer. Effectively partition it, add another standard OS install with a valid license of course, use BCDedit and make it the primary partition instead. Then you would have to ensure all configuration worked / migrate it as needed.

However -- I don't really understand the use case. Azure Edition has features that are designed to be platform specific. Why would you need to restore an entire VM from within the cloud to on-premises. Are you using automation, scale sets, or deployment logic, custom images etc to create VMs in the cloud? Couldn't you just use the same automation to create a new VM on-premises? Especially if you're using a cloud-tied operating system, that might be a much better approach. I'm sure there are good reasons though, so I'm just being curious.

[YouGotServered]

Thank you for the response!

I don't have a firm use case right now, but likely just for a DR scenario.

For example, we are hosting our own servers on-prem, with some in Azure. If we wanted to restore from Azure to on prem for DR (in case Azure is being wonky), or even just for development purposes, we may want to just restore the backups that we already have that we copy from Azure down on-prem daily.

Knowing what we know now with licensing and Azure Datacenter licensed VMs, we'll just be wary of Azure edition VMs / licensing and opt out of that package whenever we can so that we can more easily restore on-prem or to another cloud when needed.

This may just be a good heads up for people like me that didn't know - if you want to restore your VMs outside of Azure for whatever reason, you may want to shy away from "Azure Datacenter" licensing.

[johan.h]

That's a fair point - unfortunately a couple of cool features are locked up in Azure Edition as well, such as hotpatch and SMB over QUIC.