ROBO licencing issue

[NFerrar]

Hi,

Hoping someone can help me sort out a licensing issue I have...

We have several existing ESXi 5.1 hosts at branches (1 per branch), these are currently licensed using the free edition of ESXi. I want to now add these servers into a new central vCenter 5.5 Standard server so they can be managed via that. In order to licence this we've purchased 125 VM ROBO licences (Standard).

My plan was just to add the hosts one at a time to vCenter and change them to ROBO licences however the first snag I hit was you can't add a host licensed with free ESXi to vCenter, fair enough so I thought I'd just change it back to eval mode in order to add it and then change to use a ROBO licence. However it looks like the eval mode was fully used before the free licence was added so I can't change it back to eval mode.

I then noticed we had a spare 2 CPU 5.5 Enterprise licence on the vCenter so I added the host in (changing it to use this licence during the import process). That worked and the host is now in vCenter using the 5.5 Enterprise key (although it shows as using a 5.1 Enterprise key of the same number), it didn't complain that the licence key was invalid due to me using a 5.5 key to licence a 5.1 host.

However when I went to change it to use the ROBO key I get a an error "A specified parameter was not correct: licenseKey" and it won't let me change it to the ROBO licence. It's not clear to me why I'm getting this error though, is there a specific issue with changing a host from a host licence to a ROBO licence (I haven't found anything on this)? I did find this article VMware KB: Assigning license to an ESXi host fails with the error: A specified parameter was not cor... which indicates it could be a licence version number issue however I would have thought I would have gotten this error when I tried to apply the 5.5 host licence to the host in the first place but that worked fine. The ROBO licence in vCenter just says v5 rather than v5.5 so is a ROBO licence version point specific and I need to downgrade that to a 5.1 licence or is something else going on here?

Thanks,

Nick

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

I could be wrong, but this might be related to the ESXi/vCenter Server version you are using. If I understand the new ROBO licensing correctly, per VM licensing requires ESXi and vCenter 5.5 Update 2 or later (see e.g. Compare VMware vSphere Editions). In previous versions ROBO was licensed per CPU.

André

[NFerrar]

Yeah I'm thinking the issue is maybe you can't licence a 5.1 ESXi server with the new type ROBO licence? I've added in 5.5U2 ESXi hosts fine and they're happily using ROBO licences (they were running in eval mode previously though).