Dear All,
We currently have license for vSphere 5.0 essential plus kit license for three hosts with 2 CPU/host. Recently we are looking to upgrade to 5.5 essential plus. I've following questions.
- Do you need to have active support contract to be eligible to obtain license keys for 5.5 essentials plus?
- If our maintenance contract is expired, we are not eligible for upgrade ?
When I go to the online myvmware portal and I select option to 'I want to upgrade license keys', I see "There are no products with license keys that can be upgraded", what does this mean we can not update ? Please note our active contract will expire in march 2016
Kindly assist and please let me know if some more details are required from me.
Regards,
There is no difference on license between 5.0, 5.1 or 5.5, your license for version 5.0 can be used for any version of vSphere 5.x.
About the upgrade, you will need a Support and Subscription contract active to upgrade your license for a major release of vSphere, like the version 6.
Here are some links about license upgrades and licensing of vSphere:
VMware KB: How to upgrade license keys in My VMware
VMware KB: Licensing ESXi 5.x and vCenter Server 5.x
Note from above link:
- The vSphere 5.5 does not need new license keys. The existing 5.0/ 5.1 licenses will work and enable all the features of the software once upgraded
Hello,
Thank you for your links and response. So what I understand now is that even if our contract is expired still we can download 5.1 or 5.5 and use same product key of 5.0 to unlock new software ?
Please correct me if I understood wrong.
Thank you,
Wajeeh
From VMware KB: Keeping a vSphere environment up to date
vSphere product licensing encompasses the whole major release of the product.
André