Symptoms
Consider the following scenario:
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You have Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 installed, or you have Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010 installed, on a server that is running Windows Server 2008 R2.
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You have not activated Windows Server 2008 R2.
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You try to activate Windows Server 2008 R2 by using a Key Management Service (KMS) server in your organization.
In this scenario, Windows activation fails, and you receive the following error message:
Error: 0xC004F074 The Software Licensing Service reported that the computer could not be activated. The Key Management Service (KMS) is unavailable.
Cause
This behavior occurs because the default configuration of Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 does not have an access rule that enables the protocol that is used by Windows activation when you use a KMS server.
Resolution
To resolve this behavior, manually add a new access rule in the Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010 configuration to enable this traffic.
To do this, you must first create a new protocol definition for the KMS traffic. Then, you must create a new access rule to enable this protocol from the LocalHost network to the relevant KMS servers inside your organization.
The protocol definition for the KMS traffic must have the following properties:
Protocol: TCP
Direction: Outbound
Port: 1688Note If you use Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010, the new access rule will not be saved when you export the configuration. This is because the rule was added outside the Forefront Unified Access Gateway management console.
More Information
To start the Windows activation process, do one of the following:
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Click System and Security in Control Panel and then click System. Then, in the Windows activation section, click Activate Windows now.
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Or, at a command prompt, type the following command, and then press Enter:
slmgr.vbs /ato
