Abstract: Certain aspects of the technology disclosed involve providing a virtual machine instance with license management data to identify and differentiate various virtual machine instances. A virtual appliance may generate license management data in response to a triggering event of a virtual machine. The triggering event may include any of a migration, clone, snapshot, or request via a representational state transfer endpoint. The virtual machine may provide the license management data to a license server and a licensed application configured to run on the virtual machine. The license management data may be used in resource management systems, such as a license management system, to defeat licensing exploits in a cloud computing environment.

Abstract: Some embodiments include a method of preventing software licensing exploitation in a virtual environment. The method includes: retrieving, by a first instance of a licensed application running on an original virtual machine as permitted by an original software license, an original unique identifier from a virtual device in the original virtual machine; creating, by a hypervisor of the virtual environment, a cloned virtual machine instance as a copy of the original virtual machine; retrieving, by a second instance of the licensed application running on the cloned virtual machine instance, a new unique identifier from a virtual device in the cloned virtual machine instance; and determining, by the second instance of the licensed application running on the cloned virtual machine instance, that the original software license does not apply to the cloned virtual machine instance because the new unique identifier is different from the original unique identifier.