The short answer is, if you are already licensed by SELECT Server (any that have been released since 2006), do nothing, the license that activated your XM version will also license V8i. If you are not licensed by a recent SELECT Server you will need to contact our Technical Support Group for licensing and they will get you converted over.
That said, I want to take the opportunity to dive into this topic a little further. When we released XM, that marked a significant change in how Bentley licenses its software. For lack of a better term, we called it XM licensing. Hindsight 20/20, that was probably not the best choice since now we are faced with (and I would add very logically so) How do I get a V8i license?
So let's step back and take a broader look at the history of Bentley licensing. It reveals that we have in essence three generations of licensing or three types of licensing. SE / 95 would be the first generation, J through 2004 Edition would be the second generation and, XM and V8i would fall into generation three. That gets us away from associating a version to a license type, which is helpful for the purpose at hand but I will go one step further to tie SELECT Server into this.
SELECT Server will serve out licenses to both the second and third generation of licensed products as defined above. This brings me to my next point, note that on web downloads, SELECT Server does not have a version associated to it. Search all you want for SELECT Server V8i, it isn't there. We dropped the version association in the name and are only calling it SELECT Server. This serves two purposes, going forward we will only maintain the latest and greatest SELECT Server for download, and second, SELECT Server will license both backward and forward versions of our applications.
Does this mean users need to upgrade to the latest version of SELECT Server? Absolutely not (unless that is you would like to take advantage of the new functionality that is provided in each release). The bottom line is, if you want to license the latest software release, all you need to do from a licensing standpoint is use a SELECT Server that manages the 3rd generation of Bentley licensing.
-Steve