Hello Tigerola,
Once you have obtained a permanent key, or simply a fresh key all together, from our Customer Care representatives, or from your Sales Representative, you can simply swap out the keys with minimal impact to production. Evaluation keys install automatically with SFW, if you do not install a permanent key during the installation process. There is not a method for uninstalling / reinstalling the software using the same evaluation key, hence the need for a new eval extension, or a permanent key.
Additionally, unless the disks containing the data were left as Basic disks, or were created as Windows Compatible Disks, then you may have a bit of trouble maintaining the data from those disks if the SFW software is uninstalled, as we place a Private Region on the end of the disks which are normally not read by Windows.
At this point, I agree with Wally that a permanent key or a Basic key may be best. Once you've obtained that, simply perform the following steps to replace the key in your production environment.
***** IMPORTANT NOTE *****
Do not perform these steps if you have an MSCS cluster configured and working, as this will cause an outage. Additionally, using the commands below for stopping / starting Volume Manager (vxvm) may bring disk groups offline. A scheduled maintenance window would be best, if it is not possible to have less than a few moments of downtime.
1. Browse to the \Program Files\Common Files\Veritas Shares\vrtslic\lic directory and remove any files that exist here (or back them up to a different location to be safe).
2. Go to Add/Remove Programs > Storage Foundations for Windows (Server Components) > Change
3. Select the 'License Management' option and add the permanent license Key.
4. Complete the Wizard.
From the Storage Foundation for Windows (SFW) perspective, it is necessary to restart vxob (for 4.x) and vxvm (for 5.x only). After adding the new key through the above steps, the next step will be to run the following from a command prompt:
SFW/HA 4.x:
net stop vxob
net start vxob
SFW/HA 5.x
net stop vxvm
net start vxvm
When running a VCS cluster, it is safe to perform these steps without causing an outage.
If VCS cluster is being used, it is necessary to restart HAD as well as using the commands above to restart the Storage Agent. The following commands will stop the cluster while leaving the clustered application running.
hastop -local -force
hastart
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
E. Jameson