Licensing issues ESXi 7

[JoakimLjungberg]

We have autostart issues on two Dell Poweredge R740 servers.

We run ESXi free on both of the hosts, no VM is configured with more than 8 vCPUs and the host has 32 vCPUs in total.

We do not use any unlicensed features what I know of. 

When rebooting the hosts none of the windows VMs on the servers autostart because of licensing restrictions on the server. Linux OS boots up nicely however.

We try to assign a Essentials Plus license and the problem remains, the only thing that helps is to install a Enterprise Plus license, then all the VMs autostart as they should.

The only thing I can think of that is a bit special about these hosts are the persistent memory that 2 of the Windows VMs are using on the two hosts, but I can see nowhere that persistent memory requires a enterprise plus license.

Has anyone got an idea what could be wrong or how I am going to troubleshoot this?

[fabio1975]

Ciao 

Your statement "autostart because of licensing restrictions on the server" is not clear to me because if you mean license restrictions on the ESXi side, the Free Edition allows you to use the autostart of VMs (even VMs with OS Guest Windows, I just tried on a 7.0 with Free license).
Have you tried to remove the reservation of the Memory? (not a limit to my knowledge ... unless it conflicts with the maximum RAM size). Have you tried looking into the ESXi Host logs or events after booting the ESXi host?

[JoakimLjungberg]

Hi Fabio,

I missed one detail since we are a bit out of sync on these servers (on the licensing side of things).

But, the VMs wont even start because of the licensing issue. So it is not just the autostart of VMs that is affected, it is the startup/shutdown of them as well. And like I mentioned all works well with a Enterprise Plus license applied. 

Strange part is like I mentioned that the startup of linux VMs on both of the hosts are not affected.

There are no issues with reservation or maximum RAM size, and I cannot really see in the logs what the issue is exactly, just seeing that we have license restrictions.

[fabio1975]

Ciao 

Ok, so the problem is also present when you try to start a Windows VM manually. It's correct?

While everything works fine on VM with linux OS.
Normally VMs don't start if the ESXi license has expired, with the free ESXi version you shouldn't have the problem.
Have you tried looking at the logs of the individual VMs? There may be information about particular problems at startup This is the KB with the info
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1007805

Can you put a detail (screenshot) of the HW settings of the Windows VMs that do not start?