If you work with Microsoft Hyper-v on windows Vista or windows Server 2008 then you no doubt use SYSPREP to prepare virtual machine templates. If you are still building each VM and installing windows from scratch then you are making life hard for yourself, in which case I suggest you read THIS.
When you first install Windows your rearm count is set at 3. You can see the current rearm count by running slgmgr.vbs /dlv and looking at the following:
Remaining Windows rearm count: 3
Note: If you install a service pack the count will increase by 1
When you exceed the rearm count you should get error similar to this KB
When you run the sysprep /generalize command, the activation clock will automatically reset, this ensures that when you first boot up you get the 30 day grace period before license activation. This can only be done 3 times, after this you will no longer be able to SYSPREP that windows installation which. This is incredibly annoying as obviously you need to update your templates occasionally.
However there is a good reason, as if you could indefinitely reset the windows activation then you would never have to activate windows, thus a free license forever.
NOTE: This limitation does not exist on windows 2003 and XP.
Thankfully you can bypass resetting the activation clock by using the SkipRearm setting in the Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC component. This enables you to run Sysprep multiple times without resetting the activation clock.
But you MUST remove this setting or set to 0 on the final running of sysprep otherwise the grace period is not reset(additionally the CMID is not reset which can cause problem with KMS activation).
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