I did a full deployment of v7 cm, ess, smgr, asm.. not an upgrade and basically had the BP send me all the license files and enabled me for the SW download and did it on my own.
For this, I need to do a 6.3 - 8 upgrade that will include LSP's etc.. I have not installed AVP nor upgraded SMGR with data migration. Like I mentioned, I'm leaning toward the BP selling all the suite and server licenses and any relevant h/w and I'm going to do it myself. Or split the responsibility to reduce the cost. The services cost is more than upgrading the licensing suite and h/w.