I had an issue where we needed a small domain to register it’s Windows 2012 virtual machines to the main KMS of the company.
The problem was the small domain had it’s own IP range and it’s own DNS. I attempted to activate the virtual machines and received a message reporting the KMS was not resolvable in DNS.
Since this was a tiny domain and the DNS would not be managed, I needed another way to activate the virtual machines.
Looking at the options of the slmgr script, I found what I needed.
slmgr.vbs /skms <ip address>:<port number>
This tells the system where to look for the KMS and what port to use.
After the “OK” message, I simply attempted activation via:
slmgr.vbs /ato
The virtual machines activated.
techdork 