hi,
with an old account (last used 5 years ago) I got ESX 5.1 and kept it up and running for 5 years on an old 6 core AMD Phenom platform, then mainboard was dead, I bought a new one, had to reinstall ESX 5.1 and ended up with a 60 day trial till I find my old license key, login information etc but in the meantime company name changed, email acount changed, no backups etc
Now I should investigate in Horizon View 7, got a trial license for that too and now it misses some ESX features. Looking into the release notes it says the ESX box has a build number 77xxyy which is basically ESX 5.1 without any updates. However Horizon view likes to have update 2 for supporting some accelleration features vital for VDI
And there we go... I once signed up with my new account at VMware for ESXi 6 and 6.5 with my new account (company name changed the last 5 years), have license keys for the free thing and can download updates, but just for these. So far ESXi 5.5 and 6 have some issues with my whitebox I like to keep the 5.1 up and running.
Is there a way to obtain a free license for esxi 5.1 although it seems to be out of life now?
With my current account the regular ESX 5.1 updates I can't download... why? It was free so why the downloads are restricted?
The custom roms for 5.1 are available even in update 3 level, and I can access all of patches for esxi.
So question is:
- can I build the level of esx 5.1 update 2 by applying the publically available patches by applying all patches since the build number is > 2.xxx.yyy?
- is there a way to obtain the update 2 or 3 legally? I feel if I find my old username and pwd I could do so but not if I never registered for it so the download area is grayed out.
- what might happen if I do the update from a custom rom?
That what I know from updating the 5.5 / 6.0 evaluations is that there is an iso file that has an install / upgrade mode but the custom roms have some special mods for the mentioned hardware, e.g. for the Fujitsu workstations...
