I recently saw an Exchange deployment in excess of 50 servers within the organisation. Big deal, there are plenty of larger ones...this one however had a huge amount of nags when you start EMC – all about licensing.
In a test environment I can understand about not wanting to licence your boxes however this was a live org! Exchange 2007 has the option to have the serial number entered or not – without it, you get a nag screen every time you start EMC and Exchange acts like a fully working demo for 120 days. Even after that you still carry on working though you get nagged to enter the product key!
It isn’t rocket science though – you get serial numbers when you buy Exchange and entering the key is not that difficult. In fact it is downright simple and you don’t even need to touch the server in question...yes folks, Powershell...
Set-ExchangeServer –id YourExchangeServerName –ProductKey ‘90210-999-5552323-90210’
The best bit though is wondering WHICH of your servers are licensed and which are not. Obviously this means PowerShell again...
Get-ExchangeServer | Where {$_.ProductId –eq $Null –and $_.AdminDisplayVersion –Like ‘*8.0*’} | Select Name, RemainingTrialPeriod
Since you can set your product key at any time, you can script your entire Enterprise using PowerShell which I’ve mentioned before. So in your DR plans you can put all of your deployments of all of your Exchange Servers as PowerShell scripts including all of the serial numbers too.
1 comment:
Don't forget that when you buy your Exchange client licenses you must first buy the standard license before upgrading to the enterprise license. You cannot buy the enterprise license alone you have to buy the standard license first
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