Reach out to your SE/AM to get assistance on finding what promotions you could apply for. But most likely, yes, you'll have to pay to upgrade and get a support contract.
No, none of your HW will work for newer releases as they're only supported over ESXi, and 7.x releases only ran on MCS servers You'll also need to buy new HW, or verify if you have existing servers which support UC products, you'll need to review that in the virtualization wiki.
HTH
java
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