However, you do not get vSAN, vMotion or HA,etc in the Essentials Kit. That Essentials kit also comes with vCenter Server Essentials license. You'd get the license for up to 3 ESXi hosts, each having up to 2 sockets each. The best solution, in my opinion, would be to purchase a perpetual vSphere Essentials Kit license from VMware (not vmug). You could use that time to upgrade whatever NIC or HBA, to be compatible with v7. The VMUG keys are not perpetual and next year you may not get another 6.7 key, but as of now you'd get through at least another year and perhaps longer if they keep 6.x in their store. The problem is that VMUG will not say when a particular product version will drop off from their online store. And hope your 6.x keys are still available in the VMUG online shopping list. Each year you would login to VMUG Advantage store and download another 1 yr license key (there is roughly a 4-7 week grace period to obtain the new key before the old one expires). The license keys for vSphere are still for only 1 yr even if you have a multiyear VMUG membership. Not sure if they fixed that yet, but it had been a bug for a long time. At checkout if you selected to purchase 3 yr membership they still only charged for 1 yr. You can use discount coupon found at and other such blogs to further lower the cost.Īlso, they had a bug when purchasing the memberships. If you purchase a multiyear VMUG Advantage membership it's 2 yr $360 or 3 yr for $510. VMUG Advantage is $200 for one year and that would get you the license keys for one year. They could be there for another 5 yrs or they could drop off tomorrow. The VMUG Advantage online store still has the 6.x vsphere license keys available, but they won't say for how much longer. I have a Dell T20 and I remember reading that the customized image 6.7U3 was the last one that will work with this server and the dell H310 crossflashed card) ( I am not sure that I can successfully upgrade to 7.0. Is there a way to get free license key for 6.7 anymore? And I tried the key I got for 7.0, but that did not work. I tried to get a new key, VMware will only give me new keys to 7.0 and 8.0. So I tried to go to vmware to my account to see if I have the key there. I had registered ESXi 6.5 I think and gotten the license, but that license key is lost, since I do not have it backed up or saved anywhere From what I have read, after the expiry, I will not be able to start the VMs or create new VMs.

The ESXi install tells me that I have 40 odd days left before the license expires. So I had to reinstall ESXi on a new flash drive. The flash drive used to run the ESXi died on me.

Vmware esxi 6.0 key