Hi there,
have a 6.5 environment with valid vSphere and vCenter 6.5 licenses. Plan to do the upgrade as follows:
vCenter to 7.0.3 on day X
upgrade all ESXi nodes to 7.0.3 on day X+1 week
If I upgrade my 6.5 licenses to 7 on vmware.com, will the old licenses stay valid in the vCenter? Even if I depose the new licenses in vCenter 6.5, all old licenses will stay valid, right? The only thing I'll have to do is NOT to delete the old licences. Can someone please confirm this?
Because we always want to have the opportunity for a rollback if things go wrong and after day X, the ESXi nodes will keep on running on 6.5 for 1 week.
Best Regards
You are allowed to use both 6.x and 7.x licenses for a limited time during an upgrade/migration. Talk to VMware Sales if you are unsure.
Yes, they will stay valid in vCenter.
Although the license keys will still work, you're likely violating the license agreement that way.
Why don't you simply upgrade the license keys after upgrading the hosts, and/or vCenter Server?
André
If this was the case, an upgrade would not even possible. If you have 30 nodes to upgrade, how can you first upgrade the nodes and then upgrade the licenses? Before you finish upgrading the last node, the first few nodes will already be offline because they don't have a license.
You are allowed to use both 6.x and 7.x licenses for a limited time during an upgrade/migration. Talk to VMware Sales if you are unsure.
You should have VMware Subscription to upgrade the license key to latest version.