So I have a Windows 10 Pro VM. It is fully legit, licenced & activated.

I typically run it as a 10 Core, 24GB RAM VM when im gaming. When im not gaming i run it in a less resource hogging mode of 4 Core, 8GB RAM VM.

The problem is when i swap to the lower Core & RAM count it breaks the Windows Activation because its such a drastic change in hardware. This in turn has me left staring at the "Activate Windows" watermark on the lower right side of the screen when I run it in the less resource hogging mode. 

Has anyone else has faced this issue? Any clever solutions to get around it?

Edited December 8, 20214 yr by AceRimmer
Updating to solved

EDIT2:

Just leave the core count untouched. As long as you aren't isolating those CPU cores from Unraid, Linux should be able to use the cores even though there is a VM running on them (since the VM is idle). Changing memory should not trip the WGA activation message.

Edited December 8, 20214 yr by Xaero

3 hours ago, Xaero said:

EDIT2:

Just leave the core count untouched. As long as you aren't isolating those CPU cores from Unraid, Linux should be able to use the cores even though there is a VM running on them (since the VM is idle). Changing memory should not trip the WGA activation message.

 

Ok I'll give that a go. I'm more so worried about Unraid causing stutter or lag if it's using the VM cores during gaming but from what I gather from your post Unraid had been using them anyway without me realising. Thanks for that advice mate. 

Correct. The Qemu/KVM Hypervisor is just a process running under the Linux kernel, so the Linux kernel's I/O, memory, and CPU scheduler handle dishing out resources to it. Setting things like the number of cores only result in the guest OS behaving like it has those resources available to it. When the guest OS creates a thread, the linux kernel ultimately decides which CPU core it actually runs on. An exception to this would be to pin the core assignments (this forces the kernel to always run those threads on the specified CPU) and to isolate the cores from the kernel itself (this prevents the kernel from running native Linux processes on the specified core) by combining CPU pinning and isolation you can effectively section off your CPU so that ONLY threads spawned by the guest OS are running on those CPU cores.