Hello
As long as the support and subscription contract (S&S contract) is active, you can downgrade or upgrade your licenses.
However, I would take a screenshot with the version 7 licenses, before downgrading to version 6.
As the license change is between Essentials and Standard it may need some offline time and/or suspension or deactivation of some services with HA, DRS, Clustering.
If your VMware structure is simple, i.e. no HA, DRS, Cluster configuration. You could try the following path
1. add the vcenter server Standard and vSphere Standard 6 CPU licenses (these are the new licenses, which were previously downgraded to version 6) in the vcenter Server, licenses section (Do not activate them yet)
2. disconnect the ESXi hosts from the vcenter server, the VMs will continue to work.
3. Change or assign the vcenter standard v 6 license to the vcenter Server.
4. verify that the current license of the vcenter server is now Standard
5. Now add one by one the ESXi hosts, during the process you must assign the new vsphere Srtandard license. (needs root user and ESxi password).
6 Verify that the ESXi licenses are now vSphere Standard.
If you have concerns (that would be normal) you could choose to shut down all VMs before starting the changes.
Enrique Espinel
Senior Technical Support on IBM, Lenovo, Veeam Backup and VMware vSphere.
VSP-SV, VTSP-SV, VTSP-HCI, VTSP
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