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Can you help me with my software licensing question?

I'm having an issue with my Smartermail mail server and doing windows updates. Even after doing the stock MS security updates, the smartermail service seems to crawl to a halt in terms of performance. I cloned the server (it's a virtual machine) to try and debug the issue further.

I'm concerned that if I connect the 2nd clone to the internet, then MS will deactive the license of both the clone and the original. The machine is Windows Server 2008 so I know they changed their activation scheme and I believe they can tell if two machines with the same license are checking in. The machine are almost identical, but at least the MAC address would change during the cloning process.

Does anyone know? I really need to debug the issue in isolation, but need the machine online to test performance and get the updates, etc.

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There's no such thing as deactivation, there is only activation and reactivation. The scenario you would have would be that you'd have to reactivate the cloned server, then if you switch back to the original server, it would need to be reactivated, and so on and so on.

I'm fairly certain there's an activation limit (dependent upon license type) so I'd be rather cautious about doing this more than once or twice.

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