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IB_LM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

esxi5.1 free license

Hello,

Currently running esxi5.1.0:

How is it possible to downgrade Evaluation license to a free license?

How is it possible to upgrade expired Evaluation license to a free license?

How is it possible to downgrade Essentials license to a free license?

When trying to do so - this error message appears:

"the system memory is not satisfied with the 32gb"

From what i picked-up, earlier versions (5.0) do not have the RAM limit. Assuming that is correct, is it possible to downgrade to 5.0?

- Upgrading to 5.5 is not possible at the moment.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

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8 Replies
OscarDavey
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

ESXi is still a free product, however the 5.1 version is limited to the amount of ram that you can have running on the box.  32gbs is the limit.  An upgrade to 5.5 will remove that restriction.

If you let the license expire you will lose the ability to manage the vm's running on the host.

Once you purchase the product it will provide you with a product key  .

Best regards

Yours, Oscar

JarryG
Expert
Expert

AFAIK all versions of ESXi-hypervisor (free) have limit on RAM, except for the latest one (5.5) which removed this restriction. So if you can not upgrade to 5.5 (as you wrote), then either reduce physical RAM to 32GB or less (then you can install 5.0/5.1-free), or get paid license.

_____________________________________________ If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! 😉
IB_LM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hey,

I am pretty sure there is a 5.0 which does not include the 32GB limit... :smileyconfused:

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gabinun
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

That hard limit on memory was only till 5.1. Now you can go upto 4TB RAM on free ESXi from version 5.5

These are the new maximums:

  • vSphere 5.5 supports 320 Physical CPUs per ESXi host
  • ESXi host supports 4 TB of Memory in vSphere 5.5
  • 16 NUMA Nodes per host in vSphere 5.5
  • 4096 Maximum vCPUs per host
  • Support for 40 GBps Physical Network adapters
  • 62 TB VMDK virtual disk support
  • Supports 16 GB FibreChannel end-to-end Support
  • Increased VMFS Heap, 64TB open VMDK per host max
  • Virtual Machine Hardware Version 10 in vSphere 5.5
GN
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IB_LM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

If i put in the CD 5.0, would it be possible to downgrade from 5.1?

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JarryG
Expert
Expert

"...I am pretty sure there is a 5.0 which does not include the 32GB limit..."

Really? For FREE version (not 60-day evaluation license)? I'd like to see it! FYI, vSphere5 (again, I'm talking about FREE hypervisor license) had initially very low 8GB RAM limit (I do not remember how it was with ESXi 4.x). After long and loud complaining from community VMware increased this limit first to 32GB (iirc, in 5.0A), and now removed it alltogether (in 5.5). I'm pretty sure there was never ESXi 5.x (x<5) hypervisor (free license) without any limit limit on host-ram...

_____________________________________________ If you found my answer useful please do *not* mark it as "correct" or "helpful". It is hard to pretend being noob with all those points! 😉
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IB_LM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

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IB_LM
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

So, any suggestions for ways to run ESXi free (not 5.5), and be able to run it with 64GB RAM?

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