Building a KMS Host on Windows 8

Support Lifecycle: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle?C2=16796

This blog post is part of a series of posts, detailing the build process and activating capabilities of a KMS host on a particular host operating system. The operating system dictates which KMS host key (CSVLK) can be installed on that particular host, and that CSVLK determines what KMS-capable clients can be activated. When implementing KMS activation in an environment, it is best to determine all of the potential volume license operating systems for your KMS clients and then pick the best key. To simplify this, it is recommended that the most current KMS CSVLK be used, insuring that all KMS-capable operating systems that have been released at that time can be activated.

Note: Desktop KMS CSVLKs can only be installed on hosts with desktop operating systems (that support that CSVLK) and Server KMS CSVLKs can only be installed on hosts with server operating systems (that support that CSVLK).

This blog post pertains to a KMS host with Windows 8 as the operating system.

Windows 8 is no longer in mainstream support (for more information, click on Support Lifecycle link above). Windows 8 should be upgraded to Windows 8.1 to continue being supported.