SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Upgrade And Migration - Convert Farm License Type

When you click on the convert Farm license type link, you will land on the convert license type page. This page will give you the option to change the license type from standard to enterprise or from trial to regular.

Convert license type page’s direct link - /_admin/Conversion.aspx

There is a situation when you have to change the product key of SharePoint farm. For example,

1. You have a SharePoint Server with a standard client access license. Now, you want to use the enterprise features for which you have to convert your license type from standard to enterprise.
2. You use the SharePoint 2016 trial product key (valid for 180 days), which is going to expire and you may want to upgrade it to your regular key.

In this type of situation, you do not need to uninstall SharePoint and reinstall with the correct key. Rather, you just need the valid key. From Central Admin, you can update the product key from trial to regular or from standard to enterprise edition of SharePoint. SharePoint Binaries are the same for the standard enterprise or even trial version.

The most important thing, to keep in mind, you can go from the lower version to the higher but cannot go from higher to lower.

• If you have SharePoint Standard, then you can upgrade it to SharePoint Enterprise.
• If you are on SharePoint Standard Trial,l then you can go regular SharePoint Standard or Enterprise.
• If you are on the SharePoint Enterprise edition, then you cannot go to SharePoint standard or trial.
• If you are on the SharePoint Enterprise trial, then you can go only to the regular SharePoint Enterprise edition.

You can go from the higher to the lower version. You have to install SharePoint with the standard product key on the new Server. From the existing Farm, turn off the enterprise features from the site collection, and restore it to the new standard farm. This method is not supported, as this method can bring some orphan stuff with it. The best way is to use 3rd party tool or manually move the content to the new Farm.

Note

The product key cannot be retrieved from SharePoint, once configured, you have to store it at secure place manually. Even if you lose the key, it does not matter, as long as you give proof to MSFT that you hold valid licensing, which covers the Servers and users.

Convert license type

In order to change the license type, you need a fresh Product key for the desired License type (i.e. going standard to enterprise then you need a valid 25-character long enterprise key or from trial to regular). Please follow the steps given below to change the license type.

• Login to Central Admin with the account member of the Farm administrator group and also local admin on the Server.
• Go to the Convert License Type.
• On this page, enter the correct Product key and click OK.
  
• Now, wait for a couple of minutes, as it is updating it.
• Now, you will see the screen, as shown below.
  

As per my experience, it would be really great, if we perform the IIS reset on all the Servers in the farm so that nothing is stuck in the cache.

This concludes the session and we successfully converted the license type from standard to enterprise.