I am new to VMWare and will be in class for ESX 3.5 all next week but right now I have a problem. I have 3 ESX 3.5 physical servers and another blade running VC on Windows 2K3. The VC ended up failing on me, service refusing to start and after a lot of reading here, checking and changing dependencies of the service I tried a repair of the install only to over write the DB, but VC was working again. Now the 3 servers are still pointing to the "old" VC and I can't get them unmanaged. I had a similar problem a month back and when I first found this site read how to fix it and made it work. I can, for some reason, no longer find those threads (should have bookmarked), and all I remember was to edit the vpxa.cfg file and erase the serverIP info but that didn't do it on it's own. I know I am forgetting something, thank you for any help.
Welcome to the Forums - the solution is simple simply add the Hosts to the the new VC environment -- you will receive a warning saying the host is being manage by the old VC server ignore that and they should add with out a problem - when you overwrite the DB you deletede the passwords VC creates when you add the esx hostss and the information about the ESX servers -
Have fun in the class -
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Thank you for your response but I have tried that already and I get the message "There are not enough licenses to perform the operation.". I have yet to license the VC but the ESX servers are licensed.
Do you have your license file, it has an extension of .lic? If you do not it can be downloaded from the VMware Store account under which it was registered and if you do not have that you can contact VMware and they will be able to get you another copy. You will need to place this .lic file on the licensing server which will license you for VC and adding ESX hosts -
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There is a vc agent license required to connect your ESX hosts to vCenter. If your existing license server is still up and running, make sure your vCenter can connect to it and see seeing the licenses correctly. License vCenter first, make sure you have vc agent licenses, then connect your ESX hosts to vc.
-KjB
VMware vExpert
Maybe I will need to wait for the class to learn how to use the license server properly, but I do have the .lic file that I uploaded to each of the 3 ESX servers to get them out of trail mode. I did that weeks before making the VC (was just experimenting at the time). So that is how the ESX's are licensed, but I am still running the VC in trail mode, mostly because I have yet to figure it out.
Thank you all for your help. I have figured it out. I was not even using the VMWare License Server like I should have been, like I said, I loaded the .lic file into each ESX server one at a time. After playing around with the License Server some I was about to move the .lic file into the correct folder and load it. After that the servers added just fine to the VC. Thank you everyone