Strange way to activate Windows 2008

The activation of Windows 2008 Enterprise (MSDN) is not intuitive.

At this moment I am preparing a presentation about Windows Azure, the new operating system for cloud cumputing from Microsoft. I ‘ve made a VMWare image for developing Windows Azure applications. The base of the development environment is Windows 2008 Enterprise.

Last week, when I started the development environment, a message appeared that the Windows environment has to be activated within 9 days.

OK. Let’s activate. With Start - Control - Panel - System, I got the following screen:

However, after choosing the link 9 day(s) to activate. Activate Windows now the following message appeared:

And after clicking "More information the message DNS name does not exist appeared.

Why?

How to activate then? For Windows 2008 you must activate by clicking the link "Change Product Key" on the "System" screen. Then you fill in the product key (which also is required when installing) and then the activation is complete.

So, you have to fill in the product key,both when installing and when activating Windows 2008. A bit strange.