NewVCMS as part of upgrade

[neil_murphy]

Hi,

I'm planning an upgrade of a farm with 6 ESX 2.5.4 hosts and a VC 1.4 management server. I would like to build a brand new v2.5 VCMS with a new fresh database and import all of my ESX 2.5.x hosts into this as a first stage. I would then remove the original v1.4 VCMS.

Is this possible? If so, how to I import the old v2.5.x license keys?

[weinstein5]

If they are using host based licensing it is not a problem you can just add them to the VC 2.5 nevironement - if you are using the licensing server in VC 1.4 you will need to leave that running until you can migrate your hosts to 3.5 - check out for vmware's resommended upgrade path -[http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_upgrade_guide.pdf]

[neil_murphy]

Surely this only applies to ESX 3.x servers that use the new type of license files? ESX 2.5.x used a license key that was entered during the ESX installation phase. VC agent and VMotion license keys were uploaded to VirtualCenter as a text file so no Flexnet license server was involved.

[weinstein5]

That is correct - with VI-3 the format of the license did change -