Activating Perpetual Licenses on New Server

mihai_maier90

I am switching RedGate Monitor from an old server to a new server and the old server has perpetual licenses activated.

In order to use the perpetual licenses on the new server, do I need to deactivate the perpetual licenses on the old server, perform the switch from the old server to the new server and once that is completed I activate the perpetual licenses on the new server?

ThomasBE

If I'm not mistaken, deactivate and active is the correct solution to go.
Just make sure your old server is connected to the internet when deactivating.

You could also add the key to your new server already and see what is does?

As a precaution, you could already try and open a ticket with support to have somebody "on stand-by" when you do the switchover?

I'm surprised though that if you switched base monitor and web server but kept your database, the license isn't present on your new server.

ThomasBE

I would check to use the migration manual for your base monitor:
https://documentation.red-gate.com/sm13/moving-the-base-monitor-to-a-different-machine-195790020.html

mihai_maier90

Hello Thomas, I have followed that article above and the base monitor setup and / web monitor setup and switch of the SQL server went all fine and everything was working fine. The only issue I had on the new server was that all the servers were unlicensed and I was not able to assign any licenses.

My guess is that the perpetual licenses were still activated on the old server. I am just wondering if that is the only step I missed where before switching it, I need to deactivate the perpetual licenses on the old server and then perform the switch to the new server and activate the perpetual licenses and assign license to each server.

My only concern is if I deactivate the licenses on the old server and I cannot activate them on the new server, I won't be able to rollback to the old server as an emergency.

mihai_maier90

Thank you for feedback Thomas, much appreciated.

I will give that a go.

The only downside is that our perpetual licenses have support and updates expired and physically we only have the licenses themselves. Since support and upgrade option is expired, I don't think I can raise a support request while performing this switchover.

Yep. I will keep the old server active when I am deactivating the perpetual licenses, then once deactivated I will turn off the base monitor and web monitor on the old server.

The behavior I got with the licenses when I switched over was the following:

***The perpetual licenses were not deactivated on the old server just an FYI***

1. The link worked fine on the new server and all the servers were loading up with the status as unlicensed.
2. Once I click on the configuration > licensing, all the statuses of all the servers were in Awaiting state and if I attempted to active the perpetual license on the new server, it was giving me an error stating: ''Failed to activate perpetual license as this was already in use''.

My wild guess is that if I deactivate it on the old server and and activate it on the new it will allow me to assign the licenses.

The only concern that I got is that if I deactivate it on the old server and I cannot activate it back on the new server nor on the old server, the monitoring tool would be down and it would cause quite some noise.

I will look into working a plan to get it sorted out.

Thanks a lot once again for your feedback.