There is no disruption of traffic or downtime while changing the licensing tier from the Basic Edition to the Enterprise Edition. Once the Controller is in the Enterprise edition, all the features available on the NSX Advanced Load Balancer can be utilized. Please note the Basic Edition of Avi Load Balancer (formerly known as NSX Advanced Load Balancer) has reached its End of Availability (EoA) date on Jan 30th, 2024. The changes only apply to the Basic Edition of Avi Load Balancer. For additional details, please visit https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/96386.

Procedure

  1. Check the available Enterprise Service Units on the Controller. The available Enterprise Service Units must be sufficient to license the existing SEs. Changing from the Basic Edition to the Enterprise Edition is only allowed if sufficient licenses are available on the Controller.
  2. Import and upload the NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise license using UI if the Enterprise license is not available on the Controller.
  3. Set the value of the default_license_tier to the enterprise. 
    [admin:ctrl]: > configure systemconfiguration
[admin:ctrl]: systemconfiguration > default_license_tier enterprise
overwriting the previous entered value for default_license_tier
[admin:ctrl]: systemconfiguration > save
  4. Once the mode change is successful, the SEs are licensed with the Enterprise Service Units, and the Basic Service Units are freed up.

Results

The new system-default objects are created according to the Enterprise edition support. The configurations and features available on the Controller will be as per the Enterprise Edition feature enforcement. All the features on NSX Advanced Load Balancer is available when the NSX Advanced Load Balancer is in the Enterprise Edition.