Question on the licensing thing.

[macpiano]

I have not officially upgraded the 4.1 licenses to 5 but when I just looked at doing that it sounded like I couldn't keep my 4.1 hosts. I am going to upgrade but some maybe not for a couple months.

What is the scoop on this?

thanks

Gary

[duhaas]

There is nothing that will invalidate the keys you already have defined in vcenter for vsphere 4 hosts.  When you upgrade your lics online, you will be granted new keys that you install that you will apply against esxi5 hosts are you bring them into your environment.

[vcpguy]

Also, after upgrade if you need to downgrage you can always do that.

[chriswahl]

You are supposed to stop using the old licenses after upgrading (I believe a warning will present itself to this nature).

That being said, during a transition phase I don't see how anyone would care outside of an auditor, and I'm not aware of any sort of call home feature being tied into any of the VMware licensing processes.

I went through this very same process a few quarters back, and nothing stopped working after we upgraded and consolidated our licensing. This allowed a nice POC environment to be stood up to ensure the logical design was correct, to weed out any upgrade issues, and get comfortable for the real upgrade to production.

Cheers.

[Heimatplan]

Normal Process:

1. Upgrade all your licenses and acquire the keys

2. Upgrade your VCenter

3. First thing after it: Cut/Paste the the VCenter 5 and ESXi 5 Licenses you've aquired

4. Upgrade your ESXi hosts to 5 whenever you want

5. When everything is done you may want to remove the 4 licenses

Ingo