Hi all,
I hope this is the right place to ask because I'm in need of some serious help.
I've had a single ESXi 5.0 host running on a free license for about a year now. I needed fire up a couple more VM's which would mean adding more memory to the server. It had 16GB and I upgraded it to 64GB it has a single processor fitted and two processor sockets. I knew the free license only allowed me 32GB but I stupidly assumed that it would just ignore the other 32GB, instead it's invalidated my free license and now no VM's will start. I've read that if I pull out 32GB I could probably re-apply the free license but that isn't a viable option: the server is not local to me (it's in a colo) and I couldn't get physical access to it until late Monday at the earliest and this machine must be up and running first thing Monday morning.
My original plan been to buy an Essentials license to activate the other 32GB when we needed it but it looks like it's going to have to happen this weekend. To compound the problem I don't have backups of any of the VM's that are currently on the host. Fortunately there's only one (maybe two) that I really care about, unfortunately it's got a 300GB virtual disk and there's no way I could shift 300GB over the Internet by Monday which leads me to question one...
Keeping in mind that I have a 5MB, limited data allowance connection to the host is there any feasible way to back up the one VM I really care about? If it's any help the drive on that VM probably only has about 50GB of data on it so if I could zip it I think it would shrink down to a manageable amount of data to drag across the Internet.
Whether I can back up the VM or not I need to get these VM's back on line quickly. The quickest route would seem to be to buy an Essentials license at about £500 (I'd like a Essentials Plus licence but there's no way I afford £3500) does that sound like the best route? If it does that brings me to question two...
I'm currently running the "ESXi 5.0.0-2012..." image according to the vSphere Client (I believe is 5.0 Update 1) and the Essentials Kit seems to be version 5.1. Should I, or perhaps how do I, upgrade to version 5.1 and should I do it before or after buying and applying the Essentials Kit license?
Many thanks for any help, Graham