Windows Activation question.

I know that HyperV can transfer licensing settings/informations to the VMs, but I do not think than that is the case for VMWare. It looks like that in your scenario... from the legal perspective you are covering your OS guests licenses with a DataCenter License of your physical host and therefore it covers the licenses of your VMs. But technically your VMs are not aware of that.

I was working with the same issue with KVM/Open Stack a few months ago and we noticed that definitively with KVM it was not possible to transfer the license to the VMs, therefore, we adopted the solution of configuring a KMS server.

A KMS server is a service that can activate your Windows operating systems in the network, however in order to make it work you need to complete the following tasks:

1. Install and configure a KMS server.
2. Activate the KMS server license on your server.
3. Configure your VMs to use the KMS server (If they belong to the same AD domain this process can work automatically).
2. Ensure network communication between your VMs and the KMS server (it uses a custom TCP port that you can set on your leisure).