Vcenter / Vsphere License Upgrade question

[TotoGA]

Hi guys,

I'm now preparing an upgrade of our vm environment from 6.7 to 7.x

I cannot just take off old and move all to new, I have prepared new server with Vcenter 7.x  and I'm planning to move all systems one by one in the future 3-4 weeks.

Now when I go to my license section here on vm website, I can chose action and upgrade all my licenses to 7.x but then I get a warning that I should remove all old versions and it say that this action might affect other users.

Now my question is, when I upgrade my license keys, will my old 6.7 environment stay active ? or will it stop working ( licensed) ?
in other words, does my vcenter / esxi servers constantly syn / check the keys with vmware license servers ?

or is this a legal thing, and there will be no issue with my old servers ?

I cannot just move all servers in one click I need more time, so I cannot just take and remove vm 6.7.

thanks in advance.

[a_p_]

From a technical point of view, nothing will happen to the old environment when you upgrade the license keys in the portal.
However, the usual way to upgrade an environment is to do this within the 60-days evaluation period, which starts with the installation/upgrade of vCenter Server and/or the ESXi hosts. Once done, upgrade the keys, and apply them.

Why - if you don't mid me asking - did you setup a new vCenter Server rather than to upgrade the existing one?

André

[TotoGA]

Thanks for your reply.

the reason I didn't upgrade :

1. my active environment is on mostly older servers, so we are moving stuff to new / better faster servers.
2. I cannot afford downtime whenever I want, I need to prepare new system, then make sure nobody is using the vm's on old , for example end of the week etc. to move / upgrade them.
3. Some servers are not compatible with esxi 7.x
4. this way I'm also sure that if something goes wrong on newly installed v 7, then at least not everything, just the migrated will have issue, in the time of migration. in other words it gives me time to breath.

[cbrock01]

Yep, this is the "correct" way to do it. Are you a VMUG member? I'm doing something similar right now, but as a VMUG member, you get 365-day evaluation licenses which is good for 2 vCenter instances and 16 host CPUs (ESXi). So we took two hosts and have started configuring the new environment exactly the way we want it and we don't have to worry about the 60 day expiration. Once the environment has been configured, then we'll swing over the other hosts and use the 60-day evaluation licenses until we're ready to upgrade our production licenses.

[Kinnison]

Comment removed...

[cbrock01]

I've read the terms. I should have been more specific- we're setting up a test/lab environment for our configuration. By the time this environment is in production, the evaluation license will have already been replaced.

[Kinnison]

Comment removed...

[cbrock01]

To be fair, the 60 day evaluation licenses are also not supposed to be used with production either. The VMware EULA states,

"EVALUATION LICENSE. If you license the Software for evaluation purposes (an “Evaluation License”), your use of the Software is only permitted for a period of thirty (30) days (unless we specify otherwise), and you may not use the Software with production data." 

As I mentioned with our specific situation, we don't intend to have any production workloads on our VMUG licensed assets. However, I have talked with someone that works with VMware licensing, two different VMware account managers, and a couple of senior engineers from VMware and they all agreed that these can be used (including VMUG's) for swinging over our production to the new environment but should be immediately replaced with production licenses once the migration is completed.

[Kinnison]

Comment removed...

[a_p_]

Your reasons for not upgrading the ESXi hosts are perfectly fine, and that's actually a common scenario.

However, you could still upgrade vCenter Server (and its license), which doesn't affect the 6.x ESXi hosts, and then replace your hosts one by one.
If you cannot finish the host replacement within the 60 day evaluation period (that's about 8-9 weeks), you can still split the ESXi/CPU license key(s) in your VMware Customer Connect Portal, and upgrade only the number of licenses that you need first, and the upgrade the remaining licenses as needed.

André

[TotoGA]

The thing is, our environment is highly unstable, I many things are happening, we have people working on projects that are planned for 6 months in advance, so if I'm upgrading and at same time users come in the morning and start to work, then the system must be online, so in combination of migration to new physical servers, and upgrading older it's not so easy to just turn off upgrade etc... and those that are very important must be cloned / backedup first. so its a bit more responsibility and risk.

I have now converted my old licenses and already started to move systems to newly installed v7. for now everything works nothing has gone off 🙂