Wireless Access

The licensing is supposed to expire after a period of time or circumstances when the MCR currently running cannot reach the MCR that had the licenses installed with a proper passphrase.

Best bet, make sure that your licenses are loaded on an MCR with the current passphrase being used.  Also, you should be able to accomplish something similar to your planned flow by just grabbing a flashbackup and performing a restore on the new VM.

Thanks @chulcher 

To clarify the synchronisation should work as per my plan above & the licensing will be retained as part of that synchronisation? 

Or I can take a flashbackup.tar.gz back up from the existing conductor prior to the rebuild of the new, then once failed over restore the flash? As the flash will include the licensing? 

At no point will I actually have to re-add/ re-activate the licensing using the passphrase? 

Licenses are registered and validated with the passphrase.  The system uses the system MAC address as part of the algorithm to determine what the passphrase will be.  The license database, once loaded on a machine with a different passphrase, should be invalidated shortly thereafter.  Licenses will need to be re-issued from NSP/LMS and tied to the new passphrase of the MCR that you choose to use as the licensing server.

The flashbackup just provides an alternative method to get the MCR operational without having to go through the whole initial configuration and synchronization with the active MCR.

For licensing, make note of the CLI output on each Conductor

#show inventory
#show license passphrase

After the migration, verify on the new VM's the output is the same, then you shouldn't have licensing issues, in my experience. You can manually change the MAC's on the new VM's to be the same as the old ones, before loading the guest OS (AOS) or backups. Else you'll need to use the new passphrase on the Aruba/HPE portal to re-apply the licenses.

Good luck!

@Dan Ok - thanks. Using your method: 

A 'show inventory' displays the following info. Is the license tied to the HW MAC addr 00:0C:29:01:8D:87 in this scenario? This is the MAC of the NIC adaptor in VMware. 

Mgmt Port HW MAC Addr           : 00:0C:29:01:8D:7D
HW MAC Addr                     : 00:0C:29:01:8D:87
Product key#                    : MMD018D7D
Activate license                : Not Applicable
Active device type              : MM-VA-50

Updated steps - to avoid having duplicate HW NIC MACs on the network simultaneously: 

-Ensure synchronisation is successful between the 2 MCRs. 
-Failover to the Hyper-V secondary using VRRP priority.
-Take down the Hyper-V primary. 
-Rebuild VMware primary using a manual MAC address assignment taken from the Hyper-V primary.
-Ensure synchronisation is successful between the 2 MCRs.
-Failover back to the VMware primary using VRRP priority. 
-Take down Hyper-V secondary. 
-Rebuild VMware primary using a manual MAC address assignment taken from the Hyper-V primary.
-Meaning the MAC/license relationship doesn't change throughout migration.

Are the licenses only tied to one MAC? i.e. primary MCR 

I did some testing and it's actually the Mgmt Port HW MAC Addr which dictates the license passphrase. So I will go ahead with the plan in my previous message, with regards to using the previous VMs MAC address on the new VMs NIC. 

Shout if there are any major concerns!