License expired prematurely

[sonicle]

Hello, we experienced a serious problem two days ago, with our licensed VMware ESXi 6.5.0 server stopping all our VMs around 13:00.Using the VMware web interface we could see that no VM could started anymore because of "license expired". Our 3 years license was acquired and installed on December 2020, and should have been valid until December 2023. We found the license was turned into all zeros and described as an expired evaluation version. It tooks almost 2 hours for our IT partner to figure out what happened and obtain the license key and enter it again, which was succesful. So we had 2 hours of complete down in all our offices and 2 hours of work for our IT partner to solve it. How could this happen? Is this a VMware known bug?

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

Don't open a post, but call VMware Licensing Support. Only they can give you a correct answer by checking your license agreement.

regards,

Alex_Romeo

[sonicle]

I tried, but I did not find any way to contact the License Support.

Also, consider that the license was fine, when entered again it showed the correct license period (until December 2023).

What I consider a technical problem is that the license got zeroed by itself, with no human intervention.

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

ok! connecting to: "https://customerconnect.vmware.com/support" and open a Tecnical support request and specifying the licensing problem.

If they can't fix it they refer you to the person who takes care of it.

regards,

Alex_Romeo

[sonicle]

Unluckily that customer has no technical support active, just license maintenance.
Looks like there is no way to tell VMware that there may be a bug in their software, if you have no paid support.
That's another reason why I'm moving over to Proxmox + illumos storage wherever I can.

Thanks for your help!

Ciao Alex!

Gabriele