Do your Windows 2016 Servers have mysterious shutdown issues?

Today, I tried to troubleshooting windows 2016 mysterious shutdown for my client, I found it was NT Authority\System that shutdown the system because the windows 2016 server license was expired, this is easy enough to solve the issues, I thought.

I went to the system settings and type the product key, but it shows the error message “This edition cannot be change be upgraded”, seriously, I cannot use the MSDN product for upgrading it from evaluation version to Data Center (or Standard) version?????

I don’t believe this, so I tried another way via DISM command for this as follow:

  1. Open an elevated command prompt
  2. Run DISM /Online /Set-Edition:ServerStandard /ProductKey:your-product-key-here /AcceptEula

    Ps. If you would like to upgrade to Data center version, you just need to change ServerStandard to ServerDatacenter.

  3. Reboot server after the operation completed successfully.

Ya! Activated successful. We won’t get any mysterious shutdown now.

Hope you enjoy this post.

Cary