ESXi - can I revert to the 60 day evaluation license ?

[reallandog]

We have a couple of ESXi hosts with the Free license applied.  This license limits our guest VMs to 8 vCPUs.  We have an immediate need to support guests with 16 vCPUs.  It will take a while before I can get license purchased.

I have seen mentions of a 60 day evaluation license that allows for full features.  If that would support a guest with 16 vCPUs, I'd like to use that while I work with our purchasing dept.

If I remove the existing free license from the host, will that put me in evaluation mode??

Thanks for your help!

[berndweyand]

reinstall is the only legal solution

[scott28tt]

There’s a clue in the name, evaluation mode is for evaluating the software, which it sounds like you have already done.

Reinstalling ESXi just to run it in evaluation mode when you’re not evaluating the software and instead working around a limit of the free licence might well be a violation of the evaluation terms.

Is using the vSphere Essentials Kit not a quick, affordable, and legal option? https://store-us.vmware.com/vmware-vsphere-essentials-kit-282883900.html

[IRIX201110141]

No.
The eval start with the first start of ESXi and ends 60 days after that. Its not the uptime because its the period of time since first powered up.
Within these first 60 days you can switch and change between licenses but after that you cant back into Eval mode.

There is only one option to get 60 new days of eval. When ever you update your ESXi to a new major version it will automaticly go into eval mode again because during a upgrade there is no way to deploy a new license. This job have to be done as a post upgrade step.

Regards,
Joerg