Hi all.  I am in a interesting situation and I am wondering if a VM would help me?  I have about to acquire some rather expensive software.  The license is locked to the PC it is installed on.  Therefore I would like to hang on to this software and the machine it is licensed to for as long as I can.  Do you think if I installed it on a VM  that I would be able to convert that VM to a physical machine and keep my licensing?  I just hate to install this on a laptop or something, then a couple years down the line have a hard drive crash or lose the laptop and have to repurchase the software or a license.  Any experience with something like this would be appreciated.

 

Thank you.

I think a lot depends on how the locking is achieved!  If it is tied to the hardware in some way then there may well be problems transferring the license to a physical machine.

 

What MIGHT work is to install in into a VM and then move the VM to another machine (rather than a physical machine) so that the emulated hardware remains constant.    Do you know if there is an option to uninstall the software in preparation for moving the license to another machine?   If so you could test this out.

16 hours ago, itimpi said:

I think a lot depends on how the locking is achieved!  If it is tied to the hardware in some way then there may well be problems transferring the license to a physical machine.

 

What MIGHT work is to install in into a VM and then move the VM to another machine (rather than a physical machine) so that the emulated hardware remains constant.    Do you know if there is an option to uninstall the software in preparation for moving the license to another machine?   If so you could test this out.

Very good thoughts.  Thank you.  So basically put it on a VM in unraid and then maybe move it to a VM on my laptop?  I may try that.  I looked in to moving the license and I can only do that if I get there support involved which will presumably only last  a year or so. 

Spitballing, but you'd probably want the VM to not use CPU host passthrough, as it'll then see the model / serial number of the CPU which will differ from the laptop, and it *may* then think it's on a different machine