Zimbra Clone, ubuntu upgrade, license issues

[adamdudzik]

Hi,
I have a question, as the support so far does not seem to be very helpful.

I would like to test the upgrade of Ubuntu from 20 to 22 with Zimbra 10.1.11. For this purpose, I created a test environment that mirrors the production environment 1:1, using a cloned virtual machine of the production Zimbra server. This means that behind an additional router I have the same addressing as in production, and the test server (the cloned Zimbra) does not need to have its IP address or anything else changed.

My question concerns licensing. I have two licenses: the production one already installed on the production server, and the NFR license which I want to assign to the test machine. The problem is that both the license change and the installation of the Zimbra package require the server to have network access, which means that for a short period of time I will have two servers online with the same license.

Is this safe? Or should I expect issues with the license on the production server? What is the proper way to safely switch the license on the cloned production server? Do you have any experience with this scenario?

It seems to me that this should be a fairly common use case, but so far I haven’t received a clear answer.