I have a customer with PI 3.4 installed (ESXi VM). They need to upgrade to a minimum of 3.8 to support some new hardware (C9500-24Y4C-A switches). I have looked at the release notes for versions 3.4 thru 3.10 and can see a sort of path. 3.4 -> 3.5, 3.5 -> 3.7 and 3.7 -> 3.8. If they want to go to 3.9 then they can't as it was initially built with 3.4 and won't work because of the underlying Red Hat 2.0 OS.
To go from 3.4 to 3.9 (or 3.10) they would need to upgrade from 3.4 -> 3.5, 3.5 -> 3.7 and do a backup. Deploy a fresh 3.9 (or 3.10) PI instance and restore from the 3.7 backup.
What happens with licenses in this scenario? Is it all Smart Licensing and therefore just a case of removing the old product instances on software.cisco.com and letting the new PI 3.9/10 server register and consume the released licenses?
The documentation for all versions 3.4 to 3.10 mentions license files, which surprised me a bit if its all Smart Licensing?
Any takers?
Andy