vSAN license cannot be assigned to the chosen asset

[abaucom555]

I am part way through upgrading an old 6.7 system to 8.0.   I tried to go direct to 8.0 but was forced to upgrade to 7.0 first.   I now have a stretched vSAN cluster of two esxi hosts running 7.0.3 and a witness running 7.0.3. 

I was able to upgrade my windows vcenter to 8.0.  

Each of the vSphere hosts was assigned a 7.0 license no problem.  

The vSAN license 7.0 will not assign "The created license with serial key XXXX cannot be assigned to the chosen asset"

My vSAN eval license expires in 3 days! 

[maksym007]

So why do you want to assign a license which will expire in three days? 

Try to add your license in vCenter and you will get the description. Maybe you have the wrong one. 

[TheBobkin]

@abaucom555, If your vCenter is on version 8 then the vSAN license for the cluster needs to be a vSAN 8 license (regardless of whether the nodes are on ESXi version 7).

Is there a particular reason you are using an Eval license and not a proper one?

[abaucom555]

I can add the license to vCenter but it shows a yellow triangle next to it.  When I try and assign it to the vSAN cluster, it does not show up in the list of available licenses.    The existing 'eval' license assigned to the vSAN cluster during the upgrade, expires in 3 days.  The license is correct, 7.x which matches the running vsphere hosts in the cluster.

[abaucom555]

I was unable to migrate my old Windows vCenter 6.7 (after months of vmware support help).  I stood up a new VCSA 8.0 thinking I could upgrade the hosts direct to 8.0, but realized I had to upgrade the hosts to 7.0 first.   I had all of the proper 8.0 licenses which I downgraded to 7.0,  the 7.0 licenses (vsphere, vsan) loaded ok into vCenter 8.0 and the vSphere 7.0 licenses applied ok to the hosts.  The vSAN 7 license is not applying.

[TheBobkin · Accepted solution]

@abaucom555 ESXi licenses are applied at the host-level, so if they are running ESXI 7 then a version 7 license is fine, but vSAN is licensed at the cluster-level and the cluster is a vCenter-entity and thus the required license version for vSAN is governed by the vCenter version - you cannot apply a version 7 vSAN license if the vCenter managing the cluster is on version 8, your issue here is completely expected behaviour.

[abaucom555]

Thank you.  I guess I'll be doing my 8.0 upgrades sooner than later lol.