Issue

Main thing I found was a command to get your started:

slui 4

To my dismay I was greeted with a greeting, much like the thread poster:

"Can't activate Windows by phone."

If you keep reading there are other potential reasons for activation to fail, but that usually happens afterwards with a dedicated error code. E.G Attempting to activate a evail edition, or using a MAK key instead of a retail one, or using the wrong key with the wrong edition (Standard vs Datacenter).

In the first example it makes sense, as well as the last one. In my case I was using the proper image downloaded from VLSC with the key from the same web portal, So I knew I was good on the first and second examples. The middle example of requiring the use of a retail key didn’t seem right, as I would assume any version would suffice. *NOTE* At this point I was merely assuming, as I couldn’t fully verify my key as I wasn’t utilizing a VMAT server. Again this is an offline activation.

Solution

Now for my realization, I had made yet another assumption, and that was I’d assume slui 4 would provide a pop-up that would allow you to enter your product key before starting, and the error message doesn’t exactly convey that with an incorrect error message of: “Can’t activate Windows by phone.”

When in reality it should have simply stated “Please set a product key first”.

as it turns out you have to use: Windows Software Licensing Management Tool and can be accesses via elevated command line using slmgr.vbs.

Yes that’s right a Visual Basic script. ;P.

C:\Windows\System32> slmgr.vbs /ipk <Key>

/dli (This will show basic license and activation information.)
/dlv (This will show detailed license and activation information.)
/xpr (This will show the current expiration date of the license installed which is most useful when using a KMS key with a local KMS activation server on the network.)
/upk (Be careful with this one as it will uninstall your current license key.)
/cpky (Also be careful with this one as this removes license key information from the registry.)
/ipk *****-*****-*****-*****-***** (This will change your license key to the one entered. If there was no key entered previously this command will also attempt to activate the license based on the license key type.)
/ato (This will force an online activation immediately. This could be useful if you have already entered the new key but was not online with either the KMS server for the network or unable to reach Microsoft’s activation servers.)

After doing this, then running slui 4 again, I was prompted with a screen asking me to select my Region. I then proceeded to use a Phone to call the toll free number provided and follow the IVR prompts to get a confirmation ID.

After entering the confirmation ID, I successfully activated Windows Offline. I did note one thing, that I told the IVR I did not have a smartphone so I did not get the web link as mentioned by others in the comment area. You can save this link and use it to do offline activations without calling in to the phone number from another machine that is online. If I manage to get this link I will share it as the commenters in that other post did not do the same.

Hope this helps someone.

PowerCLI 12.0

Offline Install

Checking VMwares source wasn’t too insightful…

Just this with the “Download” button redirecting to an alternative site non-other than powershellgallery.com …clicking manual Download gives you the raw nuget package let’s try to install first normally.

Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI

No way it failed, expected, and it even states a warning about the network.

Alright so using an online computer copy the nuget package to the offline (use USB sticks, Floppy drives, Zip Drives, serial modem if that’s what it takes…)

In my case I was testing this on a VM and simply used a USB stick to mount it to the VM from the VMRC console, and copied the nuget file to c:\temp\PowerCLI

This from this MS Doc page on the cmdlet, is for Visual Studio, we are using powershell only…

This topic describes the command within the Package Manager Console in Visual Studio on Windows. For the generic PowerShell Install-Package command, see the PowerShell PackageManagement reference.

Sure enough this is where I gave up on this path. All the new stuff is nice with it all being connected makes life super easy, but in those locked down situations this is a hassel. Since I wasn’t sure how to install the nuget package via a simple ID option like Install-Package for VS PS, there wasn’t one for the regular PS Install-Package cmdlet. Then I went to google how to accomplish this and was a bit annoyed at all the steps required to do it via the package manager… Read this by William on Stackoverflow for more details.

Lucky for me I found an alternative blog post, which does an alternative offline install and much, much simpler.

From the online system instead of saving the nuget package we save the modules files themselves directly.

 Save-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -Path C:\temp\PSModules

Copy the entire contents of the PSModules folder to a storage medium of your choice (e.g. USB flash drive) and transfer the files to the desired offline system where PowerCLI is needed.

If you have admin rights on the target system, you can copy files to the location below.

 C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules

At this point he goes on about some settings and stuff, I wasn’t exactly sure how to use PowerCLI, as usually it opens up in a custom PS window before. Now you simple import-module *modulename*

Import-Module VMware.PowerCLI

Now creating custom ESXi images should be a breeze!

Extra Bits

Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)

The VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program collects data about the use of VMware products. You can either agree (true) or disagree (false). For offline systems, only the rejection (false) makes sense. The command shown below suppresses future notifications within PowerCLI.

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -Scope AllUsers -ParticipateInCeip $false

Ignore invalid SSL certificates

When using self-signed certificates in vCenter, PowerCLI will deny the connection. This behavior can be suppressed with the command:

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -Scope AllUsers -InvalidCertificateAction Warn

Found the types from this old 5.1 documentation you can also set it to ignore instead of warn. 🙂 Cheers!

Tag: Offline

Activating Windows Offline

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