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Can a DEV farm incl: 4 hosts (no SAN) and a Virtual Centre server move licenses to a new farm (w/SAN) and virtual centre server transparently?

Can a DEV farm incl: 4 hosts (no SAN) and a Virtual Centre server move licenses to a new farm (w/SAN) and virtual centre server transparently?

California has DEV farm with 4 hosts, local storage for VMDKs, and a separate box hosting Virtual Centre. They are Enterprise licenses.

New site, PROD, has four new hosts, a SAN, and a single Virtual Centre/License/Dbase server. I also ordered new Foundation licenses to replace DEV's enterprise licenses. Can the licenses be passed around without causing an outage or loss of record of how the hosts interoperate? Ideally, I could generate/activate/download my foundation licenses, install them on the DEV VCS which would simply push out the Enterprise licenses. Then, take those (now available) licenses and plug them into the PROD environment.

How do I do the Virtual Centre licenses? Same? In the end, we will only have one Virtual Centre computer (about 4 months)

Thanks,

C.

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BogdanSUA

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minnefornian

ASKER

From a technical licensing perspective, yes, its possible. There are 2 ways to do this:

Method A:

Once you obtained your new license for DEV, for legality sake, you need to release the license from dev first, and then apply your newly acquired license file.
Can the coexist to reduce nerves? In two months, I know I will only have one VC. Ideally, we could have to of them running and then migrate the hosts over.

Then just download or copy your original license file to the production VC server and point the licensing server to the lic file.

If I understood you correctly, you only have 1 VC server, located at Production which will be used to manage both environments.
Yes, one in PROD (new) and then the DEV has a VC but no SAN. The DEV VC is going away.
Method B.
On the vmware licensing site, you can roll up all your licenses into 1 license file. Download it and put in on your production VC at the production site.

Using the VIC (connected to VC), point each ESX server to the new license server.

Special note just for you: I've had an annoyance difficulty in the past when I add an ESX server to a VC, and then at some point later, I remove it from VC without ever adding it back to VC. The annoyance is that I lost the ability to manage the VM via the console directly. I could still power them on and RDP to them, but the console was lost until I put VC back into play. Make sure you put VC back into play and configure VC to manage your ESX servers, else you might find yourself unable to manage the ESX servers that once had a VC attached to them.
That is good to know. I rely on this console access when moving our networks around and severing ties to RDP. Thanks!
Hope this helps!

BogdanSUA

The 2 can not coexist from a legality licensing point, so maybe option B is the better path for you.

minnefornian

ASKER

Pardon me for not recognizing winks but my intent is to remain legal longterm; however, I need to get this accomplished over the next 60 days with as much transparency as possible. Can they technically co-exist?

Thanks,

Carl