HLK licensing requirements

Hi all,

We’re in the process of setting up the machines needed to generate HLK rest results for driver signing submissions.

For the life of me, I can’t find any information about licensing of the Windows installs that we need. For example, suppose we want to start off testing on and certifying for Windows 10 22H2 x86 & x64 + Windows 11 22H2 x64. From what I can tell, we’re going to need:

2 Windows Server installs for 2 x HLK/VHLK Controller (physical machines or VMs), since different HLK versions can’t be installed side by side (I think?)
3 Windows client installs for 3 x HLK Client (physical machines - we’re testing PCIe drivers)

My question is:

Can MSDN licenses for used for the Windows installations for HLK Controllers and/or HLK Clients?

It seems reasonable to use MSDN licenses for HLK Client machines, but I’m not so sure about HLK Controllers. I’ve scoured Bing and Google for information on this and I haven’t been able to find anything. I’ve looked in various license agreements relating to MSDN and Visual Studio Subscriptions and I see nothing in those about HLK.

Either I’m being excessively cautious and people just use MSDN licenses for both Controllers and Clients without thinking about it too deeply, or I’m bad at Googling, or nobody talks about it.

We have a reseller (Grey Matter in the UK) from whom we buy various Microsoft licenses, and they seem to think we’d be alright with MSDN licenses, but I’d like to get a second opinion. Can somebody who has a working HLK hardware setup explain how they licensed the various Windows installs?

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Tomas

You don’t really need licenses for your client machines. You can go 90 days without activating.

Tim, that statement may be true in the sense that what you’re suggesting works. However, everything I’ve read online indicates that Windows must be properly licensed regardless of any grace period in activation. Our system administrators will take a dim view of unlicensed Windows installs.

Do you have a source for your statement?

… Windows must be properly licensed regardless of any grace period in activation …

Microsoft allows you to use a Windows for 90 days without activating a license. If your testing procedure has you creating new clients, testing them for a week, and then disposing of them, then no one (including Microsoft) expects you to pay for a license. They understand the real world.

Now, if you keep your HLK clients around long-term, then you need to license them.

Microsoft provides eval vms for the HLK server with a six month license. They are much easier to set up and get running than building your own HLK server. Also if you do want to keep them longer you can just supply a valid product key and make them permanent.

@Tim_Roberts said:

Microsoft allows you to use a Windows for 90 days without activating a license. If your testing procedure has you creating new clients, testing them for a week, and then disposing of them, then no one (including Microsoft) expects you to pay for a license. They understand the real world.

Now, if you keep your HLK clients around long-term, then you need to license them.

Tim, you may well be correct, but I don’t know I’ll justify that to our system admins. We’ve been audited by Microsoft in the past, and I’m wary of statements saying that Microsoft won’t enforce licensing terms in the case of HLK Clients.

HLK Clients would seem to be a fair use of an MSDN license, so I think I’ll use MSDN licenses.

@Mark_Roddy said:
Microsoft provides eval vms for the HLK server with a six month license. They are much easier to set up and get running than building your own HLK server. Also if you do want to keep them longer you can just supply a valid product key and make them permanent.

Mark, I tried the VHLK which worked, but I note that it uses Windows Server Datacenter. Wouldn’t I want to keep it around so that I have the logs? I could possibly use an MSSQL server on a different machine as the data store, but MSSQL costs & licensing is a whole other can of worms. A license for a 16-core machine is $6155. I also tried setting up a Windows Server Standard VM and installing HLK on it. That also worked.

This presents me with a dilemma - do I:

(a) Try to justify the cost of Windows Server Datacenter on the grounds that (I think) I can run as many VMs as I want and hence all HLK/VHLK versions currently available if I wanted to for some reason, or

(b) Buy Windows Server Standard licenses @ $1069 each, which allows up to two VMs per license last time I looked, on the grounds that I don’t really need to run every single HLK/VHLK version.

Thanks to both of you for your replies so far. What I’m trying to figure out is how to get the most cost-effective audit-proof HLK setup that has room for adding the ability to test more Windows versions in the future.