Add product key/activation guidance to README

[dusek]

I am missing some guidance as to how to properly use this in a multi-person team.

I would like to build a Windows base box once, publish it to Atlas cloud, and let multiple team members download it through vagrant by everyone referencing it as a base box (through the same Vagrantfile that the team has access to in a shared git repository). As of course each team member has their own product key, I would like them to be then able to enter it and thus activate Windows.

The only thing that I don't understand - I presume as the base box is identical for all of them (e.g. same mac address for networking interface, though Windows might see different type of CPU on each machine), then Windows might consider it the "same" machine. Will that not create a problem when this "same" machine is activated with different product keys on different developer machines?

I would welcome some clarification of this scenario added to the README.

[dusek]

After a bit of reading through the scripts and Autounattend.xml, I found that there is a GENERALIZE variable settable in Makefile.local, which will cause packer to use sysprep with /generalize flag for the packer shutdown command (issued by packer at end of the installation process). From what I found on Google, it seemed that sysprep /generalize does something in the sense of preparing a single image to be deployable on multiple machines by deleting "installation-specific identifiers" (+/-). However I still did not read enough about it to understand whether it really does what I want (i.e. prepare the base box to be downloadable by different team members to enter each their own product key). And I don't want to experiment with our real purchased activation keys to find out :-)

[berney]

I know this is an old issue, but it's still open. I'm not knowledgeable enough to say with certainty if /generalize will remove the product key or not. There is a host of options like SkipRearm etc. that come into play.

You can try using the generic KMS keys https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj612867.aspx. These are public and not sensitive. The machine will need to be licensed and activated after it is built.