It's so bad I didn't notice this thread earlier.
For information, the statements posted previously (need to reboot, etc) are the official and recommended procedure, to guarantee nothing funny could happen.
However, by experience, you can set a license while running Trial without impact. This is NOT the recommended way to go, but if nothing strange happened on the switch in the past (memory leak, unstable process...), you should be fine.
disclaimer: this is not the official procedure and you may have a bad experience with it.
Simply enable your license : enable license xxxxxxxx
The switch must tell you it was applied successfuly. If this is not the case, stop here and find what happened.
At this point, you are still running with trial, as a show license would told you.
Then, clear the trial license : debug epm clear trial-license
A show license is now telling you you are running your new license.
That's it.
Are there any risks? Maybe. If the switch was very stable since the last reboot, you shouldn't have an issue. By experience, this works very well. I have done it plenty of time, even recently on critical core chassis. But something that should work, or work in 99.9% of the cases is not the same than 100%.
When you activate trial license, this information is written into memory and all the processes are updated with that information.
When you clear trial license, the command will remove that information from memory and the processes are updated with the current license on the switch.
Because it implies to clear info in memory, you may have something weird happening. some memory leak that have corrupted the memory, a process that crashed, a ghost process, whatever. This is very unlikely, but not impossible.
This is why a reboot is recommended. You are sure that everything is fine and updated with the correct information.
