Is there any way to detect that the image of particular VM is copied (not cloned but duplicated via simple clipboard)?
I am working on the licensing of major client-server product licensed per-socket (physical processor). Licensing is designed in a way that it can only be activated once per machine and works just fine. But I have this situation where if user copies the VM image (by CTRL+C, CTRL+V combination) and runs that image then there is no way to determine the OS change and invoke license blocking / reactivating the license. I thought I could use the combination of Hardware vendor + processor id + motherboard id but they all are perfectly same in the two images. I was wondering is there any way to detect this behavior and if not then is it possible via APIs or any other method(s) to log some licensing information outside the guest OS (on host OS) which can be retrieved later again inside the guest OS?
I have omitted the complex details for over simplification.
Platform: Windows.
Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.