Virtual Machine Error (TA_E_IN_VM, VirtualMachineException, Window 10, Hyper-V)

I've encountered an issue a couple of times with customers having problems activating their license key - after some research I found that if I enabled activation on a VM it would resolve the problem. In the cases I've investigated neither customer was running in a VM - the most recent customer was running Windows 10 Enterprise (Version 10.0.10586 Build 10586) on a Dell Precision T1650. and I was wondering if there might be an issues with activation on on that Windows 10 Enterprise. I am using the current version of TurboActivate. Also odd is that the error they get is "Extra Data was too long - Internal Error" which tended to initially make finding the problem quite difficult.

Any suggestions or ideas on why the activation might be failing?

First, use the latest version of TurboActivate (current 3.4.7), get it here: https://wyday.com/limelm/api/#turboactivate

Next, on Windows 10, make sure Hyper-V is disabled: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyperv_on_windows/quick_start/walkthrough_install

If Hyper-V is enabled then the customer *is* running in a Virtual Machine. That's how Hyper-V works. The "base" operating system is still running inside a Virtual Machine.

>> "Also odd is that the error they get is "Extra Data was too long - Internal Error" which tended to initially make finding the problem quite difficult. "

That exception is telling you exactly what the problem is. Whatever string you're passing along to TurboActivate is longer than 255 UTF-8 characters. So... make it shorter.

Thanks for the feedback - I'll have the customer check the machine. I'm fairly certain I'm running the latest version - is there a file I can check that shows the version?

Regarding the "Extra Data was too long - Internal Error" - this only occurs when I submit a license on the virtual machine - As far as I know I send the same data under all circumstances.

To see version, right-click TurboActivate.dll > Properties > Details

Thanks for the help - I was in error in that I we currently are using 3.4.6 - Don't know how I missed the update. Oh well, I will update on our next release to either 3.4.7 or to 4.0 if that is released 🙂 . Is using 3.4.6 probably causing the odd error message?

>> "Is using 3.4.6 probably causing the odd error message?"

No, that exception is a result of you passing a very large string to Activate(). You need to add logging to your app to see exactly what string you're passing to the function is.

This exception has absolutely nothing to do with being in a Virtual Machine.

Thank you again for the quick response and help. I did determine that customer did have the Hyper-V enabled and was not able to change the setting for operation reasons so I just modified the key to allow operation in a VM. I also determined that the error code was being correctly reported as 17 for attempting to activate in a VM; my error print logic was at fault 😳 . Just wanted to make sure all the loose ends on the thread are cleaned up for any readers.

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