Hello, it’s me again.
From my recent blog post regarding setting up vCenter, I had difficulties locating the area to apply the vCenter license. From what I found on the internet, it was referenced that you should go to the Host that contains the vCenter/VCSA VM, click on the VM and click on Configure. Maybe VMware changed it in version 6.7 but I could not find the same area for license registration under the VM itself.
Under the VCSA VM –> Configure –> Settings, I should see a ‘License’ section. I could not find anything of that sort. I logged in as my admin account and my personal admin account, both that have the license role and that feature was still not available.
Frustrated, I did some looking around within the vSphere client and I found the area to do this.
You need to click on the ‘top’ FQDN vCenter identifier on the left hand side of the window, which houses your Datacenter and the nodes inside.
Once you click on it, you will see the following,
As you see, now selecting the VCSA and going to the Configure section and under Settings, we now see Licensing as an option. Now in my case, I’ve already applied the license but I’m going over where I went to do this.
You would select the Assign License button to proceed with entering your key into vCenter.
Under the Assign License window, you will have two options. To select an existing license or new license. You can import the license from your License section from the admin page or you can type in your license if you haven’t already done so. I’ve already uploaded my licenses to the Administration License section, which I will show next.
Now what I have done initially was gone into the Administration section –> Licensing –> Licenses and typed in the VMware vCenter Server 6 Essential vCenter license key. When I did this, the usage of the vCenter license was set to 0 and capacity was set to 1. This was because I never assigned the license to the vCenter itself. I did this in the Assign License window as seen above.
The last and final screenshot above shows the Administrator License window which identifies my License(s) and their state and capacity.
To note: When I was in the process of importing each host, the license for those hosts registered automatically here. I did not have to enter the VMware vSphere 6 Essentials Plus License. Those just followed with each host/node into vCenter.