I've been told that using the purchased licenses for a temporary server can be difficult to reverse or reissue later. It's been suggested to simply get the sales team to issue another 60 day evaluation license to extend the current environment until the new permanent servers are built out.
If I accept your statement that the vCOPS license won't extend the evaluation period for the vCenter and vSphere server products, then I have to ask the following. Why did I get a vCenter Operations Management 5.7 evaluation license when I requested an evaluation of vSphere 5.1? This is the third vSphere 5 evaluation license I've requested in the past 4 months. The first to try out vSphere ESXi5 and vCenter 5 server in a lab on my workstation. The second was to stand up an evaluation environment for my company to test out vSphere 5.1 and migrate from VMware Server 1.x/2.x and the third was today's request trying to extend the current evaluation platform. In each request I asked for an evaluation of vSphere 5 and received the license type shown above "VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.7". Why does VMware provide this license key for an evaluation of vSphere 5 and ESXi 5? It makes no sense! THoughts?
And thanks for your insight. It's very much appreciated.