Emerson Exchange 365

Are you using vSphere Converter? What are the guest OS, are they Win7 or Server2008. I've done several P2V with XP and Server2003, did not see any licensing issues with OS.

I've seen it with all OSes. Yes, vmware vcenter converter. The emerson dell machines are usually sent with oem licenses that are tied to the hardware. So when I fire them up in vmware I usually get a "you must activate" alert followed by an invalid key failure for activation.

Yeah, that's what I have been doing. It can re-install your network drivers and mess up your binding order, but that shouldn't matter too much on a non production system.

In reply to Travis Neale:

As an aside, when you create a new virtual machine it creates a new hexadecimal identifier for the emulated motherboard and new MAC addresses for your emulated NICs.  A change in either of these on a physical or virtual machine can trigger the reactivation of Windows.  The Dell OEM licenses are tied to specific hardware, so the Windows activation and key authentication on the virtual machine will fail if you use the Dell OEM key.  Similarly, if you built a whitebox PC and tried to use a Dell OEM Windows license, the authentication would fail.  Windows senses the change in underlying hardware and triggers reauthentication.  It would trigger if you loaded the OS instance in a virtual machine or if you loaded it on new physical hardware.