Simple (?) question regarding ESX 3 and 3.5 licenses

[chrismichaelgar]

We currently have a small ESX 3 environment (4 CPUs altogether) that we're licensed for. We want to build out a much larger ESX 3.5 environment (32 CPUs).

I was doing a search and came across the rather ominous phrase "You cannot combine license files that use different licensing models, or belong to products from different product families" here:

Are ESX 3 and ESX 3.5 considered the same "product family"? Can I combine our old 3 licenses with new 3.5 ones (e.g. 4 ESX 3 and 28 ESX 3.5) for the new environment? Or do I have to buy 32 ESX 3.5 licenses?

Hope this makes sense.

[TheButcher]

Hi,

We did recent an upgrade from 3.02 to 3.5. The licenses are the same.We also still use the licenses from our ESX 2 environment in our ESX 3.5 environment.

The combine option where you are talking about is to combine the files that you created by yourself. The product Family is (I think) ESX and/or Workstation, you can't combine this.

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Yes ESX 3 3.5 are in the same product family as is ESX and ESXi which means you can combine licenses so you only need to be 28 additiional ones -

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[mikepodoherty]

Once you have the new licenses, go to the licensing homepage and regenerate your license. You'll have the opportunity to combine the old licenses with the new licenses.

Note - if you are in a large organization and the licenses were registered by different folks using different screen names, get VMware Licensing to merge the licenses into one screen name. This makes ensuring that you have all the licenses in the license file much simpler.