Ah, LTSC ... never has one of my hunch-based technical decisions kept paying off again and again. if only I knew the right people instead of having to get licenses in very sketchy ways.
You can buy it off the shelf. It's going to set you back $300+ dollars, but it's not hard. https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...
It's as if the idea of people putting together their own PCs just never occurs to Microsoft.
MS very explicitly doesn’t target these releases to consumers, it’s entirely possible to do it by adding the 4 x useless products to get over the 5 x volume requirement. It’s sad, but not shocking they didn’t cover the edge case of a custom builder. If you were a firm building machines, you’d again get a special setup and do provisioning and key burning into bios etc.
I cannot help but think that there are a lot of "dark matter" sysadmins plunking away like me, just maintaining machines for friends or tiny businesses, and that we're underserved as a market segment.
You do not need any crazy volume. I was able to get it in place, legitimately, for a metal fabricator that has maybe 20 computers total not including their operational technology (CNC devices) that they wanted LTSC for.
If you were supporting multiple users in a small business environment definitely make sure you buy as many Windows SKUs as you have end users to be compliant, however.
All of this becomes moot once you have >25 clients; then you can transition to using volume licensing and it's essentially unlimited. It still tracks it though and Microsoft can ask to look at it, especially if you change from Open to Select or some other volume pricing agreement, so keep that in mind.
LTSC 2019 is on 1809. I don't believe it's possible to upgrade LTSC 2019 to 1909. Happy to be wrong, though.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/84931-microsoft-flight-simulat...