Add Host : Problem with Upgrade from ESXi 4.0 to ESX Essentials Plus/vCenter Server

[drechsel]

Hi!

We just finished evaluation of an ESXi 4.0 installation with success and yesterday we finally tried to upgrade to ESX 4.0 Essentials Plus with vCenter. The vCenter server is running on a virtual machine (Windows Server 2003 R2). The connection from the vSphere Client to vCenter Server works fine, but we have a problem with adding existing hosts to the vCenter.

Add host: After typing in IP address, user and password we get a (correct) summary of the hardware and all available virtual machines on the host. But when we have to choose the location for the host's virtual machines we only have one choice: the datacenter which we created 5 minutes ago but not the Datastore1 or the VMStore from the host to be added. Therefore the vSphere Client tries to move the virtual machines to the new datacenter, which fails, because we have no licence for the vmotion option.

Thanks to everyone who could tell us what mistakes we make or what we have to do in order to manage our existing host with the vCenter Server!

Best regards,

Bernd Drechsel

P.S. Sorry, this might be a silly question but we are new to vmware and we already searched the documentation and the knowledgebase for some hints, without success.

[Troy_Clavell]

I am not quite sure I fully understand your question, but if you are not licensed for vmotion, you should not have DRS enabled on your cluster, do you? If DRS is enabled, this may be part of some of the other weird issues going on. Check your cluster and ensure you don't have DRS checked.

[drechsel]

Dear Troy,

thank you very much for your answer. We fixed the problem right now. The VMotion option was still activated, although we already feeded the new licence keys for Essential Plus Version, in which there is no VMOTION option at all.

It would be nice if VMWARE would disable all options which are not licensed in order to avoid such problems!

Best regards,

Bernd Drechsel