Downgrading License

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi, we have a cluster with Platinium Licence, we are creating a new cluster and want to move the license there, an leave the old cluster with just a basic license. is there a way to downgrade the license to Basic, so then we can use the platinium licence in the new cluster?

2

Hi @ElasticLiver

Yep, just go into Kibana under stack management license management and you should be able to see downgrade the basic.

In your new cluster you should be able to upload your existing license.

And since you're in existing Platinum customer, of course you can always open a support ticket and get a little help if you need it!

In addition, if the old cluster happens to be basically a dev or non-prod version of the new cluster, there's actually non-production license that you can use, but if it's being used for any production workload then you cannot "double use" the license.

You can contact your account team if you want more details.

Hopefully that makes sense.

1 Like
3

Mmmm I cant see it, just say update

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and when entering update, it ask me for license
image

4

Interesting what version are you on?

I would open a support ticket

Also, some of your features may stop working but I'm sure you're aware of that?

Perhaps you can only use the API

2 Likes
5

version 7.13.2 .....I dont think I ever saw that option to downgrade the license, when you got an active platinium license.

this is an 7.5 an also doesnt show any options to downgrade.

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also in 7.8 no option to downgrade

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Tickets are slow in LATAM acording to my coworker who manage the elasticsearch clusters before me. and also we need this for yesterday haha.

Do you think it is safe to use the API? will do the work? and yes I know that some features like ML, and Watcher will stop working changing the license back to basic.

6

Do you have a copy of your license file in case you need to reload it?

1 Like
7

Yes....so if it doesnt work with the API, just reload the license.

8

Yes sounds reasonable...

9

If you give me a couple minutes I will test on a test cluster and see what happens

1 Like
10

So I installed a platinum license
Then when I ran this this without the acknowledgment you should get

POST _license/start_basic
{
  "acknowledged" : false,
  "basic_was_started" : false,
  "error_message" : "Operation failed: Needs acknowledgement.",
  "acknowledge" : {
    "message" : """This license update requires acknowledgement. To acknowledge the license, please read the following messages and call /start_basic again, this time with the "acknowledge=true" parameter:""",
    "watcher" : [
      "Watcher will be disabled"
    ],
    "logstash" : [
      "Logstash will no longer poll for centrally-managed pipelines"
    ],
    "security" : [
      "Authentication will be limited to the native and file realms.",
      "Security tokens will not be supported.",
      "IP filtering and auditing will be disabled.",
      "Field and document level access control will be disabled.",
      "Custom realms will be ignored.",
      "A custom authorization engine will be ignored."
    ],
    "ccr" : [
      "Cross-Cluster Replication will be disabled"
    ],
    "beats" : [
      "Beats will no longer be able to use centrally-managed configuration"
    ],
    "monitoring" : [
      """Multi-cluster support is disabled for clusters with [BASIC] license. If you are
running multiple clusters, users won't be able to access the clusters with
[BASIC] licenses from within a single X-Pack Kibana instance. You will have to deploy a
separate and dedicated X-pack Kibana instance for each [BASIC] cluster you wish to monitor."""
    ],
    "graph" : [
      "Graph will be disabled"
    ],
    "ml" : [
      "Machine learning will be disabled"
    ],
    "sql" : [
      "JDBC and ODBC support will be disabled, but you can continue to use SQL CLI and REST endpoint"
    ]
  }
}

Then I ran

POST _license/start_basic?acknowledge=true
...
{
  "acknowledged" : true,
  "basic_was_started" : true
}

Then ran

GET _license

{
  "license" : {
    "status" : "active",
    "uid" : "5fa1751c-e95e-4288-86e5-d1a54d4979a9",
    "type" : "basic",
    "issue_date" : "2022-07-28T22:39:28.435Z",
    "issue_date_in_millis" : 1659047968435,
    "max_nodes" : 1000,
    "max_resource_units" : null,
    "issued_to" : "elasticsearch",
    "issuer" : "elasticsearch",
    "start_date_in_millis" : -1
  }
}

So that looks like it should work...

Then I reloaded the Platinum license and that worked ... so it should be good.

I did this on an 8.2.3 Stack but the Docs look the same for 7.13.2

2 Likes
11

Thanks for your help!

12

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