Migrate JIRA 6.4.5 to Cloud without paying for 7.6 license

[VSJ Admin]

We have an old, out of support JIRA Software installation, version 6.4.5. Runs on a Windows 2008 R2 Server. There are about 400 AD users in there but only 50 or so are active.

I have a project in my hands to migrate this JIRA to Cloud. Per Atlassian's documentation, I am first testing the whole migration process in a staging environment. I have gone through a whole lot of discovering of "gotchas" between 6.4.5 to 7.6.13. Also per Atlassian documentation, I'm upgrading to 7.6.13 of the server version before attempting to migrate to Cloud.

The migration path, as I understand it, is:

6.4.5 --> 7.0.11 --> 7.6.13 --> Cloud

Problem is, upgrading from 7.0 to 7.6 requires paying for a license. It doesn't make a lot of sense to pay for a 7.6 license to just move to Cloud almost immediately.

Is there a temporary license I can apply, first to my staging environment for testing and then to my production environment so I can get all my JIRA data in Cloud?

[Mike Rathwell · Accepted solution]

Hi @VSJ Admin ,

I think you should be able to generate 30 day trial licenses for all the things you need (including plugins) on my.atlassian.com. The big ticket will be to get your ducks in a row so you can make the leap before they run out. I think the same trial licenses will work for 7.0.11 and 7.6.13. Make sure, also, that all the plugins that you have also exist in Cloud. Not all do and some have different/reduced functionality in Cloud even where they exist in both Server and Cloud.

[VSJ Admin]

Since the server has been out of support for so long, all the addons in it got deactivated as well. The only one I kept from the 6.4.5 upgrade was Agile, but that got incorporated into JIRA 7. I think the upgrade to Cloud will be pretty seamless.

I'll try and generate that 30 day trial key. Problem is, there is no field in the error page to enter it.

Thanks for the tip!

[VSJ Admin]

I didn't realize I could generate an evaluation license straight from within JIRA. 90 days will be more than enough to do all the testing I need. Thanks!