vSphere 6.0 Standard license downgrade then upgrade

[aunathanc]

Hi guys,

Just a quick one as I'm not quite clear on if this can be done.

Basically I have two ESXi hosts, an older 5.5 box running on a vSphere essentials license and a new 6.0 box running with vSphere standard licensing.  The new server isn't yet in production, and is paired with a SAN (Current storage on the 5.5 server is local)

We have a 4 CPU license for vSphere 6.0 standard, so what I was hoping to do was downgrade 2 CPUs of this license to 5.5, and apply it to the 5.5 server, this will enable vMotion and allow me to live migrate servers from local storage to the new SAN and also across to the new host.  I then wanted to shut down the old 5.5 server, rebuild it fresh with ESXi 6.0 and then upgrade the 2 CPUs count of the 6.0 license that were downgraded, back to 6.0.

Is this possible to do without incurring a cost?  I see that a downgrade can be done free of charge, but I'm not 100% clear on the upgrade component.  Essentially I wanted to do it this way to avoid downtime, but if it comes to it then I can schedule an outage, just trying to scope it out at present.

Thanks.

[Nick_Andreev]

How many licence keys do you have? If you have one key for all CPUs, you won't be able to downgrade just 2 CPUs. A key is downgraded/upgraded as a whole.

[aunathanc]

Hi Nick,

Thanks for your quick reply.

It's a single key covering 4 CPUs (two per host), I did notice when clicking downgrade it asks how many CPUs out of the four I wish to downgrade, so are you sure it can't be done?

I also noticed there is an option to divide the key, which seems to imply I could separate the existing 4 CPU into 2 * 2CPU keys, so either way it seems like I should be able to downgrade half of the CPU count?

The part that worries me is being able to easily upgrade 2 CPUs back to vSphere 6.0, though I think we meet the pre-requisites for this in regards to having valid support contracts etc.

[Nick_Andreev · Accepted solution]

I stand corrected. I just checked and you indeed can select "Quantity to Upgrade". I've learned something new today.

From the upgrade/downgrade point of view you can do that back and forth as long as you have a valid support contract.

[aunathanc]

Thanks for clearing that up, should make for an easy migration