Migrating EXSi 5 license using vSphere client

[turbo2ltr]

I have been searching for nearly 2 hours and haven't been able to get a clear answer to this as there are so many differnet levels of licensing.

There is a machine here that I inherited when I took this job that is running esxi 5.1. It does not have a vCenter license (almost all of the answers I saw pertain to users that have vCenter).  What I see when I run the vSphere client is this:

Product: VMware vSphere 5 Hypervisor Licensed for 2 physical CPUs (unlimited cores per CPU)

License Key: [key redacted]

Expires: Never

Product Features:

    Up to 32 GB of memory

    Up to 8-way virtual SMP

I don't think there are any free versions of EXSi, so I assume this is not one of those free licenses I hear about but maybe I'm wrong..no one here knows exactly what license it is.

We need to replace this hardware.  We will be replacing it with a single processor motherboard instead of the 2 processor we have now.

In any case, my questions are:

1: How can I migrate this license to the new hardware, without using vCenter?

2: I want to confirm I will be able to manually move the VMs to the new system by copying the vmx files (I'm pretty sure I know how to do this, but just asking in case there are any gotchas or it's harder than it sounds)

3: If the new hardware only has one physical processor, my understanding is that this license be used for a second single physical processor EXSi host?

Thanks!

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

it's indeed the free license you are using "VMware vSphere 5 Hypervisor". Unless I'm mistaken you can use the same license key on any number of hosts.

1. Just enter the license key, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2014295 (Licensing a standalone ESXi host)
2. You need to copy all the VM's files, not just the .vmx file. The .vmdk files for example, are the VM's virtual disks. Depending on whether the virtual disks are thin or thick provisioned you can use 3-rd party tools like Veeam's FastSCP to copy the files. You can also backup and restore the VM's using e.g. Trilead Explorer.
3. Afaik you can use the license on any host. You are only limited to 32GB physical memory on each host.

André

[turbo2ltr]

Hmm. I see. I was under the impression that the "VMware vSphere 5 Hypervisor" was a free type 2 hypervisor, but ESXi type 1 was not free.  Thanks for clearing that up. This stuff is so damn confusing.  I think the biggest mistake was calling the whole product "vSphere" and then also have a "vSphere client".  Causes (me at least) a lot of confusion.  I think I finally got the differences straight.

Thanks!

[turbo2ltr]

Veeam's FastSCP transfers at a rate of .01mb/sec with SSH enabled on both EXSI hosts that are on the same gigabit network/subnet.  I don't know why it's so slow, but this is turning into a losing proposition.

Kind of defeats the whole purpose of having VMs if it's so difficult to move them.

[turbo2ltr]

7 hours of failure was all because of a bad network cable.  I have successfully moved VMs over using both the OVM method and VMExplorer.  Thanks.