error 0xC004F074

Problem:

Unable to activate windows 7 which was upgraded from Vista SP1 or even a clean

install. When trying to activate via KMS receive an error 0xC004F074.

How to Resolve:

This Error 0xC004F074 stands for The Software licensing service Reported that the computer could not be activated. The key management service (KMS) is unavailable.

This is a DNS issue that the necessary KMS server was not auto discovered in the particular DOMAIN

The workaround is to set the KMS server explicitly using "slmgr /skms re-vl-vm".

/skms specifies the name of a KMS host. this disables auto-discovery.

In my example, this instructs the client to use re-vl-vm as a KMS host.

Note that there is a typo. The KMS host for W7 in Corpnet is "red-vl-vm"

Note: use this only when a client machine is not receiving the KMS SRV records from DNS.