What happens after CUCM and Unity Connection 12.5 EoL

[mumbles202]

So I know that the EoL date for CUCM and Unity have been announced for this coming August.  My question is what happens in September if you choose not to upgrade to 14 or 15.  In the past if you stayed on say 10.5 or 11.x with perpetual licensing and decided to postpone the upgrade your system would continue to function as normal.  With 12.5 having to be connected to the Smart Account, what happens when the licenses expire (if that is what will happen to the license at the end of August)?  Will they just continue to work but you're locked in to whatever licensing you currently had?  Or will the application see no more licenses in the portal and then go into the warning period, similar to when you're over your subscription?

The plan is to eventually go to 15 but wanted to know if anyone knew what the expected outcome would be. 

[Roger Kallberg]

The license will not be affected by the EOL of the system. Those will continue be present in the virtual account until they expire on the Flex agreement. After that I don’t know what options you’ll have. Licenses has always been my least favourite thing to handle and therefore it’s a selected conscious void in knowledge. Maybe @Nithin Eluvathingal can help you out here, he is usually very up to date on licensing topics.

[Mohammadreza Hadi]

AFAIK, with 12.x EOL, nothing will happen with your license status..
because it is two different thing..
EOL is about of >> "end of technical support & official system sales"
but you can continue to use system with current license usage & then renew your license pool again for 12.X 
PLR license model maybe will not issue license for you, but you can continue to buy Smart license model, as far as cisco sell it..
when EOL >> cisco TAC will not tech support you anymore officially.. and will not release any more update for system..

but it is strongly recommend to upgrade ASAP to latest version (which is currently 15.X)
for latest updates, bug fix, most stability, latest features, and most compatibility with other system integration..

[Nithin Eluvathingal]

If you're using perpetual licensing, you can continue with that version indefinitely. However, since the version has reached End of Life , Cisco TAC will not provide support for any challenges or issues, and no patch upgrades will be available.

To maintain support and upgrade to version 15 or later, you need to purchase a Flex subscription, which is subscription-based.

The key difference with subscription licensing is that Flex licenses are version-agnostic, unlike perpetual licenses, which were tied to specific versions.

If you compare the subscription cost to the old SWSS and perpetual licenses, subscriptions are cheaper in the long run. Additionally, they provide some free licenses for EA customers.

I wouldn’t recommend delaying the upgrade, as the underlying CentOS has also reached End of Life .

[mumbles202]

Ok, thanks for all of the responses.  These were actually version 11 perpetual licenses that were converted so show up in the Smart Account as version-less if I remember correctly, just wanted to make sure it wouldn't be a race to get it upgrade Sept 1.  I plan to work on getting the system updated either over the summer or in the fall, just wanted to confirm.