[cisco-voip] moving/upgrading Expressway VMs

[Nathan Reeves]

Licensing on the expressway VM's is tied to the BIOS UUID (uuid.bios) and
the Ethernet0 MAC Address (ethernet0.address) of the VM's.  The Serial
number (and subsequently generated Release Keys based on the Serial number)
should remain the same across upgrades.  Moving the VM between ESXi Hosts
(assuming a VMware cluster) should not impact the Licensing in any way.
Move of the machine to a new host manually will most likely prompt asking
if you copied or moved, I would suggest choosing moved, but not 100% sure
that this maintains the machine UUID or just the VC uuid.

Recovery wise, you can record the UUID and Mac address (grab the VMX file
from the ESXi host) of the current VM's, along with the Serial and Release
keys.

Once you've deployed the new VM from OVA, manually update the VM vmx file:
- Remove the VM from Inventory (not delete from disk).
- Download the new vmx file, update the uuid.bios and ethernet0.address
values, and then upload to the VM folder on the ESXi Datastore.
- Right click on the vmx file and choose 'Add to inventory'.

This ~should~ end up giving you the same serial number on the VM on boot
and allow you to re-enter the release keys.  If you don't see the same
serial number, double check your values in the vmx.


HTH

Nathan

On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 10:52 PM, Lelio Fulgenzi <lelio at uoguelph.ca> wrote:

>
> I'm new to the Expressway world, so new, we had a partner come in and help
> us set them up. :O
>
> We had a weird experience with the licensing with one host, which needed
> manual intervention, but for the most things went ok.
>
> This raises the question, however, of how I can plan to move these VMs to
> another host, upgrade them, then move them again.
>
> As far as I can tell, the serial number to which the license is tied is
> generated at installation time and is not changed when a VM is moved, but
> I'm not sure this holds when the expressway o/s is upgraded.
>
> My goal is to upgrade the 4 vm cluster (2C+2E) offline then move them to
> the online network, rebalancing our ESXi hosts as we do this.
>
> I understand that even if we are successful in moving the VMs without
> rehosting the license, if we ever encounter a situation where we need to
> recover from backup, we need to consider if this will fail because of the
> licenses or is there a way around that?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Lelio
>
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