Microsoft Office Activation Error: 0x80072EE7

Hi Friends,

Got a good error for you today!  So I've changed the way I'm activating my Office 2010 VDI desktops to use my KMS instead of activating them directly from Microsoft.  The interesting thing about Office is that it's VERY perceptive.  If I change hardware in my VDI environment it knows it immediately and wants to re-activate Office...  I can understand why Microsoft is doing this, but what a pain when I'm just trying to introduce a new blade into my environment!

So I've been experimenting bringing in a new type of blade into my environment and from my past experience I knew Office was going to complain.  This time I was READY!

I opened up Word and sure enough, I get the activation screen.  Okay, so I go to the CLI so I can activate Office.

1.  cd Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14
2.  cscript ospp.vbs /sethst:FQDNofYourKMSServer
3.  cscript ospp.vbs /act

What?!  Error!!

What the heck is error 0x80072EE7?

I ran the script to check the error and here's what I got.

What do you mean you can't resolve the server name?!?!

I pinged my KMS, did an NSLOOKUP, no problem....  Hmmmm....

Well I was outta ideas, so time to head over to my good buddy Google.

I typed in the error and almost nothing....

Ummmm....

I kept searching and I finally found an article on the Microsoft Technet of someone that got the same error message.

This is from the page:

"0x80072EE7:
The server name or address could not be resolved
Source: Winhttp
When you use MAK product keys, the machine must be able to contact MS webservers, to activate.
This error you are getting, suggests that the machine cannot resolve the host for the MS webservers.
If it cannot resolve the name, then it cannot connect, so it cannot activate."

What the heck?  Office needs to contact Microsoft?  Isn't that what my KMS is supposed to do?  In a normal VDI environment you're probably never going to hit this problem because each of the desktops will get it's own DHCP address that will be able to contact Microsoft.  But, since I'm running in an isolated environment my desktops can't contact the outside world.

Sooooo, I had to change my internal NIC to one that could reach the outside world.  Re-ran cscript ospp.vbs /act and everything worked.

D'oh!!

This is probably why I didn't find much information on it, because most people don't hit this error.  Well, if you happen to hit the error, it might be because your desktop can't contact Microsoft.

Until Next Time!
-Brain