Vault Enterprise licensing

[!IMPORTANT]
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Appropriate Vault Enterprise license required

Vault 1.8 introduced licenses and EULA enhancements that gate enterprise features in Vault. You must have a Vault Enterprise binary (evaluation or non-evaluation) downloaded from releases.hashicorp.com to use an enterprise key. Vault Enterprise licenses do not apply to HCP Vault Dedicated deployments.

Evaluation licenses

Evaluation licenses have a 1-day grace period until the license expires. Once the evaluation license expires, Vault seals and cannot unseal until you apply a valid license.

How licensing works

To receive a Vault Enterprise license, you must agree to an end-user license agreement (EULA). Once you apply the license, the Vault Enterprise binary verifies your license with a EULA check during upgrades and any time a node starts, restarts, unseals with the following results:

License type	License state	Vault build date	Vault startup
Any	Valid	N/A	Succeeds
Any	Expired	Before expiry data	Succeeds
Any	Expired	After expiry data	Fails
Evaluation	Terminated	N/A	Fails
Standard	Terminated	Before expiry data	Succeeds
Standard	Terminated	After expiry data	Fails

Applying security upgrades with an expired license

You cannot properly upgrade Vault with a terminated or expired license. If you have an emergency and need to perform an immediate upgrade to apply critical security patches, reach out to your Vault support contact for a temporary evaluation license. The temporary license allows you to complete the upgrade and apply security patches even if your license has expired.

Additional resources

Automatically load a Vault enterprise license - Configure Vault to automatically load your enterprise license.
Automated license utilization reporting - Learn about the data HashiCorp collects automatically to meter Enterprise license utilization and how to enable or disable automated reporting
Manual license utilization reporting - Learn how to manually export, review, and send license utilization data to HashiCorp through the Vault CLI or HCP web portal.
Anonymous product usage reporting - Learn about the anonymized data HashiCorp collects automatically for product usage reporting and how to enable or disable data collection.