We've been running some production VMs at a remote location on the free vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 4.1). We're wanting to do some very basic backup stuff now. Nothing fancy but we need to leverage the vStorage APIs for Data Protection which requires any licensed version of vSphere. Essentials Kit licensing will be just fine so that's what we're planning on. My question is this:
We need to upgrade/convert from the free hypervisor to the licensed essentials kit edition but we want to maintain all the VMs running on the local datastore. If we have to, the worst-case-scenario that's acceptable to us is that we can power off all the VMs, upgrade/reinstall/etc, then power back up with Essentials Kit edition running however what I'm really hoping is that once we purchase Essentials Kit, it's just a matter of entering a license key from vCenter client attached to the free hypervisor and viola: it's magically now the Essential Kit edition.
Anyone have expereince actually doing this conversion? Were you able to maintain the local datastore and the VMs on it? any down time required? Any expereince specifically with vSphere 4.1 and not 5?
Thanks!