OK, what bozo at Microsoft came up with the latest licensing idea?
Here's the issue:
Customer has a system with 4 x 10 core processors and they were running fine with server 2008 "Enterprise" (which has support for more than 2 physical procs). We went to order another copy of 2008 for their next system and were told that we needed to start using server 2012 for future orders. FIne, they like to keep up on the technology so we ordered a copy for their test machine. Server 2012 has dropped the enterprise edition in favor of a "per processor license". One key has support for 2 processors, so you need 2 keys.
My first issue was trying to find out how to enter the first key so I call activation support. They ask me if I have the activation screen open and I said, "No, how do I open the activation screen?". Woman on the phone responds:" I'm sorry sir you will have to call technical support for that." WHAT?!?! I said: "NO. let me speak to your supervisor." Supervisor gets on the phone and proceeds to walk me through opening the activation screen (my customer had actually entered the key using the command line, but could not activate the system). The SUP proceeds to tell me to hit the windows key and start typing "slui 4" (as if I should have known that already...). Read the numbers and got me activation code. Cool. Still only 2 procs being used (all of them show up but windows will not use them without the proper license).
I told him I now need to enter the second key and he is stumped. "What do you mean second key?" Really? You are the ones that came up with this licensing scheme and you don't know anything about it? He tells me I need to contact tech support.
I have now been on the phone 3 times since and am now exchanging emails with one _SR_ engineer who has never heard of this, so I referred him to their own internal licensing page. Oh this is news to me, let me find another engineer who can help. Nothing so far...