How to renew RDS grace period on RDS hosts

This guide will show you how to renew RDS grace period on your hosts. Microsoft gives you 120 days grace period on RDS. I would say that it would be enough to run a pilot or a PoC. I encourage everyone to purchase licenses for your environment and only use this article as a last resort option for testing purposes. Do not do this in a production environment.

To renew RDS grace period, you need to find the following registry key and delete it.

“HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\
Terminal Server\RCM\GracePeriod”

Before you can delete the registry key, you need to change ownership. You can do that by following these steps:

1. Right-Click on the key.
2. Click on “Permissions”.
3. Click on “Advanced”.
4. Click on “Owner”.
5. Select “Administrators”.
6. Click on “Apply”

You can now delete the key. Reboot the server and you now have a new grace period.

Source article: How to renew RDS grace period on RDS hosts (ulrikchristensen.com)