Can I assign a vSphere 7 license to an esxi 6.7 host?

[BHagenSPI]

I'm getting ready to upgrade our production cluster of esxi 6.7 hosts to esxi 7.x. I upgraded our DR cluster to esxi 7.x a couple weeks ago, and each host got evaluation licenses assigned to them. The only way I could assign v7 licenses to the (now) v7 esxi hosts was to disconnect each host from vcenter, log into each host individually, assign them v7 licenses, then re-connect them to vcenter.

I do *not* want to do that on our production cluster if I can avoid it! So I'm hoping if I assign v7 licenses to my v6.7 hosts, and then upgrade the hosts to esxi 7.x, I won't encounter that issue.

So I guess this is really 2 questions:

1. Can I assign a vSphere 7 license to an esxi 6.7 host?

2. If that's possible and I do it, when I upgrade the hosts to 7.x will they keep the v7 license, or will they still be assigned evaluation licenses?

Thanks!

[a_p_]

What kind of issues did you experience with assigning the licenses to the ESXi hosts through the vCenter Web Client?

Licenses can only be assigned to hosts with the same major version.

André

[BHagenSPI]

Licenses can only be assigned to hosts with the same major version.

That answers it, unfortunately!

What kind of issues did you experience with assigning the licenses to the ESXi hosts through the vCenter Web Client?

We have "standard" licenses. The eval is "enterprise plus". I upgraded my v6 licenses to v7 via the portal and added the new license key to vsphere; but when I tried to assign the v7 licenses to the newly upgraded hosts, I got an error that the hosts were using a feature from the eval that wasn't supported in the standard. I never could figure out what feature was being used; the error mentioned that DRS was enabled, but DRS was *not* enabled.

I forgot to mention that we also have vsan 6.2 enterprise plus licenses (for the dv switch capabilities), so that may have played into the situation.