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BorgSquirrel
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Essentials License - add more than 3 hosts temporarily

Due to hardware upgrade I would like to temporarily add more than 3 hosts to an Essentials vCenter, is this possible at all or will it refuse? The add host button is not grayed out anyway...

If not possible, what happens if I add an Enterprise ESXi license to the Essentials vCenter and then want to downgrade to Esssentials? Except loss of licensed features, would this work/be allowed?

TIA

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IRIX201110141
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..what happens if I add an Enterprise ESXi license to the Essentials vCenter and then want to downgrade to Esssentials..

It will technicly wont work. A vCenter essentials refused to add non essentials esxi or hosts in eval mode.  The same is true for a vCenter Standard/Foundation which refuse to manage a Essentials ESXi.

Regards

Joerg

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BenediktFrenzel
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It is not possible to add more then 3 Hosts per vCenter. But you could do that if you have a not used Enterprise License lying around.

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IRIX201110141
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..what happens if I add an Enterprise ESXi license to the Essentials vCenter and then want to downgrade to Esssentials..

It will technicly wont work. A vCenter essentials refused to add non essentials esxi or hosts in eval mode.  The same is true for a vCenter Standard/Foundation which refuse to manage a Essentials ESXi.

Regards

Joerg

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BenediktFrenzel
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If you change the vCenter License first, then connect to the host and change the licenses there, you are able to reconnect them.
After the migration of the workloads, you change the license of the new host to Essential, and then the vCenter back to it's old license.

But please make sure that you have the right amount of licenses in you my.vmware.com account.

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BorgSquirrel
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Thanks for your input guys, I will attempt to temporarily re-license vCenter and then downgrade again when done.

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