vC Ops licensing not working? Common vC Ops licensing mistakes
I frequently get contacted by my customers with concerns that their vC Ops licensing is not working, or that they key they have is not recognised. It’s important to acknowledge the order of installation for vCenter Operations Manager so that the license is applied and acknowledged.
Is your vC Ops licensing not working?
In summary, this is the order that needs to be followed;
- Deploy the vC Ops OVA into your virtual environment through vCenter
- Register the vC Ops “UI VM” appliance to vCenter
- Enter a license key for vC Ops in to vCenter
- Restart the vC Ops appliance or services
- Configure vC Ops and use it
Most of the confusions expressed to me by customers comes from not following this order – such as trying to enter the license key into vCenter before vC Ops is installed, or not restarting the appliance after entering the license.
Trying to enter the license key too soon
Do you get this error? This may be displayed in vCenter – “Some license keys could not be added to your inventory”, with the scary statement “Invalid keys”
This error means that vCenter cannot decode the license key to represent valid licenses for a VMware product. This either means that the license key has been typed incorrectly, or vCenter does not have the decoding key to understand what the entered code means. To resolve this problem, ensure that vC Ops is registered to the vCenter. This can be done by accessing the UI VM console and pressing the “New Registration” button, or if you have already registered and are not able to enter the key, try “Update”.
As you can see from my screenshot, this vC Ops appliance is using the vCloud Suite Enterprise license, so the number of VMs licensed is “infinite” – if you have a per-VM license, then this will be displayed here. You may also notice that the “License vCenter Server” is actually the second one in my vCenter Server registration list – and this is the vCenter server where you need to enter the license key!
Not assigning the license key to the “Solution”
So, you have the license registered in vCenter, but it’s still not being applied? This is particularly applicable if you have a Suite license key, such as vCloud Suite. You need to assign the license key to the Solution. To do this, go to Home, Administration, Licensing, press “Manage vSphere Licenses” and then click “Next” past the Add License Keys screen (just leave it blank), until you get to the Assign Licenses screen. Select the Solutions tab, and look for vCenter Operations Manager and ensure that you assign a key to it – not Evaluation Mode!
If you are using the Web Client, then the order is slightly different – go to Home, Administration, Licensing, Solutions tab, select your vCenter Operations Manager solution and press the “Assign License Key…” button.
Forgetting to restart vC Ops after licensing
Finally, after the license key is registered and assigned, you need to either restart the vC Ops services or the whole vApp. If you don’t restart, when you visit the vC Ops console (through https://<ui vm ip>/vcops-vsphere/) then you will only see three tabs (not the 7 that a licensed version would show). So, if the Analysis tab is missing or the Reports tab is missing in vCops, and a license is assigned, then it is likely that all you need to do is restart the vApp.
You can do this in two ways. Firstly (and you probably have the screen open to https://<ui vm’s IP>/admin), go to the “Status” tab, and press the “restart” button. It takes about 60 seconds.
The second option is to restart both appliances. You can do this by right-clicking on the vApp called “vCenter Operations Manager” and choose “Shut Down”, then wait until both are off, and then press “Power On” – on the vApp, not each VM and this will take about 3 minutes.
You should then be able to enjoy vC Ops!
