KB 3062157 Breaks Single Role Exchange 2013 Servers

It appears that there may be problems, in at least some cases, when you apply KB 3062157 to servers running Exchange Server 2013 SP1 or later. It will break web services such as OWA, ActiveSync, EWS, and ECP.  The KB is meant to address vulnerabilities described in Microsoft Security bulletin MS15-064.

• https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3062157

The good news is that this problem appears to affect only  single role servers and not multi-role servers. Since most deployments have multi-role servers that will limit the impact.

If you deploy this update and experience problems, removing the update should resolve the issue and get the server functional again.


This update is also included as part of CU9 and doesn't appear to have the same issues when installed as part of CU9. A commenter on the blog below had problems with KB3062157, uninstalled that update, and installed CU9 without issue.

• http://exchangeserverpro.com/ms15-064-important-security-update-for-exchange-server-2013/

Automatic Activation for Hyper-V VMs

When you use Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition as the host operating system for Hyper-V, you can implement an unlimited number of virtual machines using that same license. This means that you can buy a single Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition license for a single physical server and run an unlimited number of guests using Windows Server 2012 R2 as the operating system.

If you have multiple Hyper-V hosts, it can be a pain to keep track of the Windows Server 2012 R2 keys for the guest VMs. Instead of using typical activation methods, you can use Automatic Virtual Machine Activation (AVMA).

AVMA activates a guest VM against the Hyper-V host instead of typical Microsoft activation methods. This means that the VM can be completely isolated without access to the Internet or other network and still be activated.

You can use AVMA guest VMs running:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

For each guest operating system you enter in a generic AVMA license key. The generic license keys are:

• Datacenter - Y4TGP-NPTV9-HTC2H-7MGQ3-DV4TW
• Standard - DBGBW-NPF86-BJVTX-K3WKJ-MTB6V
• Essentials - K2XGM-NMBT3-2R6Q8-WF2FK-P36R2

To enter the generic AVMA key, you can use any method that you typically use to enter a license key. During installation, you can use an unattend.xml file. After installation, you can run the following command:

slmgr /ipk AVMAlicensekey

To monitor AVMA licensing requests on the Hyper-V host, look for Event ID 12310. On the guest VMs look for Event ID 12309.

UPDATE: Microsoft link that also includes AVMA keys for Windows Server 2016

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/dn303421(v=ws.11)