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BE careful when installing n a VM. Most VM configurations are going to have some sort of SAN/NAS on the back-end to hold the various VM's. Honey suggested getting a Hardware License key as the RAID setup may cause issues with licensing.

The encryption software writes files to your hard drive as part of licensing. Do NOT
move or damage these license files, as it invalidate the license.
Note: Honeywell recommends you to obtain a WIN-PAK hardware key (WP2KEY)
for multi-drive RAID configuration computers. This avoids the licensing problems, if
one of the drives needs to be replaced.

We have a problem just like this with Win-Pak PE 3.2. It's running in Windows 2008 VM on a VMware VSphere cluster with a NetApp FAS2240 SAN for the virtual/shared storage.

Anytime the virtual machine is rebooted I must go through the registration procedure every time.

I do not have any virtual CD-ROMs mounted or connected at the time of registration and the configuration never changes...

Has anyone come up with a solution?

Thanks!

I am getting the same message when trying to add a second hard drive to the PC with Win Pak installed on it. The secondary hard drive is intended for storage only and has nothing installed on it. The Win Pak installation still resides on the original primary hard drive.

If I remove the secondary hard drive everything starts working again. Has anybody else seen this and hopefully figured out a solution?

I actually gave up trying to keep this working in a VMware cluster. We spoke with a local installer who Honeywell recommended as being one of the best in the area and he suggested just installing WIN-PAK on a PC. Taking his advice I started over with a fresh WP installation on a Windows 7 desktop computer and restored my database on it. Same issue! After a few weeks the user interface eventually becomes slow and unresponsive. Restarting the WIN-PAK services has no effect, and after a reboot I'm greeted with the same "License is Invalid" greeting.

Honestly, as far as I'm concerned hardware license "dongles" died in the 90s and is a neanderthal method of licensing software these days. I've got over a quarter million dollars in VMware/SAN technology running in a climate controlled and 3-phase diesel backed-up data center, and I'm forced to run my building access on an old desktop with a license dongle plugged in? Who the heck would pirate WIN-PAK anyway? It's useless without the Honeywell panels.

So here I am, still struggling with monthly reboots and having to go through the license registration almost every time. Has anyone found a solution or workaround that doesn't require a hardware license key?

Thanks

Sorry to zomebie post, but we're dealing with exactly the same issue. WIN-PAK 3.2 SE is installed on a Windows 2008R2 VM on Hyper-V. It works fine for a couple of weeks and then suddenly won't allow users to login, just hangs when opening the application. Sometimes restarting the associated services is enough to fix the issue, but sometimes not. Rebooting the server leaves us with "License is invalid". I'm wondering if anyone else found a solution to this problem? I see there's a 4.0 version available from Honeywell - maybe this version is more stable?

Thanks for any info anyone can provide.

We just upgraded one of our customers to WP 3.0 and have started getting a recurring issue. For the third time now in about two months the person who maintains the access cards has lost the ability to log into the server. Every time it has been an invalid license issue. I reset the license and then it is good for a while. Not knowing for sure how often they log in to add cards, check reports, etc. it could take a week for them to notice that it has faulted again so I don't have a good answer as to how quick after resetting that it loses the license file. I log in remotely to do the changes and I am trying to get some info together so that I am not wasting time onsite waiting to get an answer back from Honeywell.

The computer is setup on a VM, and FWIW, when I was setting up the new installation of WP, whenever I restarted the computer I had to manually go and assign the dvd drive to the VM I was using. So I don't know if that might have anything to do with the issue. I know that when we initially setup Win-Pak for this project at another site (separate servers) that we had to get a totally different server to setup WinPak on because it had issues resolving something about the hardware and would never register the license as valid. So I didn't know if we are looking at some type of "hardware" issue because of settings on the VM or what. Waiting to hear back from Honeywell right now, but thought I might check with other installers to see if someone here might have an idea.

Thanks.