Mitel Licensing

[ZentheAlien]

I am a newbie to Mitel installs and upgrades.  (Lifelong NEC tech trying to learn another brand quickly, lol)

Is there such a thing as 'Temporary' licensing, or license allocation allowed for testing of a system before deployment?

We have a customer with:
1 MiVB CXi/II Controller  (GARID)
1 MiVB MXeII Controller
1 vMiVB
1 vMBG
1 vMiCollab

All on Rev 7.2

They would like to upgrade to 10.1 and consolidate all users onto a single vMiVB, vMBG, and vMiCollab.

We were wondering if we could install new virtual machines at 10.1, manually add users, configure and test - before shutting down the existing 7.2 systems.

To do this would require both the old and new systems to be licensed simultaneously, correct? 
Would over-allocation or using the customer's existing GARID/ARID setup even work for this?
Engineering suggests using Migration Tool on all MiVB, but short of moving licensing to 10.1 I don't understand the advantage and it sounds like a whole lot to do in a single cutover night. 
(Especially since each system will require using it twice - one to get to 9.0, the other to get to 10.1, yes?  Also one would need a RAM upgrade, only to remove all users when done.)

Does anyone have a recommended method? 
Or if you could get out the crayons and tell me why the Migration Tool is the best way to go, even when it can only be used on the hardware systems - that are going away. I do not understand this.  (?)

[lundah]

Theoretically it should be possible. But with a physical controller being the DLM that's going to be a bit messy. Mitel has a professional services group that specializes in these sorts of migrations, or at least they used to, it's been a while since I worked with them. Might be worth exploring as they can just take backups of everything, do all the migrations in a lab, then at cutover just shut down the old stuff and bring up the new.

[ACDeezNutz]

I have done this before.  Break the internet connection out to the AMC on all of these controllers and reuse the ARIDs on the new VMs.  You need to clear the hardware IDs before you can use them again.  You get 30 days until the old system goes into critical alarm and basically shuts down.  You might have to make some AMC changes on your ULM or DLM depending on how that was built originally.  Move any licenses off of the physical ARIDs into the VM ARID before you deactivate them in the AMC to get the most licenses possible.  This gives you 30 days to log into the old systems for DB gathering and program the new ones.  Should make for a super smooth cut over.

[Dogbreath]

Engineering suggests using Migration Tool on all MiVB

You need to run the migration tool on MiVB + vMiVB anyway to check over the config for unsupported elements before upgrading.
The Migration Tool is what updates the firmware on MiVB, it is not optional for this upgrade step.
vMiVB can be upgraded with the "restore config from running server" method, which is usually a breeze.

I don't envy you, the whole project sounds like a total ballache