ESXi6 to ESXi5?

[Adam231]

Hi,

Firstly, let me apologies for my ignorance but I'm working hard to try and get up to speed with VMWare as I've always used Hyper-V.

I put together a lab with two separate ESXi 6 boxes which would like a dream. However, I've recently realised I have licensing through my company for vCenter Server Essentials 5 and vSphere 5 Essentials Plus. Obviously I would like to make use of the licensing/features that are available to me but I've invested a considerable amount of time putting together my current environment.

What I was hoping was there would be some way to either downgrade the two existing ESXi hosts to v5 or to port the built VMs over to a freshly installed v5.

I know it normally goes the other way round and I'm assuming theres probably going to be issues as for all VMs I selected Virtual Machine V11 as it seemed like the right choice at the time!

One more question, does the v5 license cover v5.5?

Thanks in advance

Adam

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

One more question, does the v5 license cover v5.5?

Yes, with a v5 version you can use for versions 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5.

And check if your license for v5 have a SnS active, if yes, you can upgrade your license to version 6 at no cost, see: VMware KB: How to upgrade license keys in My VMware

[Adam231]

Thanks for clarifying the v5/5.5!

Unfortunately SnS is not active, it expired earlier this year.

Any thoughts about downgrading?

Adam

[rcporto]

About the downgrade, I will recommend you isolate a host and reinstall the vSphere ESXi 5.5... and about the virtual machines at hardware version 11, you can use vCenter Converter to downgrade the virtual hardware version: VMware KB: Downgrading the virtual machine hardware version in ESX/ESXi

[Adam231]

Hey, what do you know, we were eligible for the license upgrade!

Thanks very much for that info, would never have realised