There are insufficient licenses to complete this operation - but why?

[sferry]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a fairly new VMware administrator.  Took over duties from someone who recently left our organization.  I'm familiar with most cloud computing basics (at least in theory), but still getting used to VMware's setup and administration.

We are currently running VMware ESXi 6.5.  (We have the free version.)  I have 5 VMs setup, some with 8 CPU's, some with 4, some with 2, etc  I recently tried to create a new VM with 2 CPUs, and I received the error, "Failed to reconfigure virtual machine [VM Name}. There are insufficient licenses to complete this operation."  I figured I must have reached the limit on the number of CPUs I can use on my current version of VMware.  So I went to one of my other machines that has 8 cores, but definitely doesn't need 8 cores, and I attempted to reduce its number of cores to 4.  But I received the same message.  "Insufficient licences to complete the operation..."

I could understand getting that message when trying to add CPUs to a VM, but I don't know why I'm getting it when removing CPUs from a VM.

I've made sure that my license key is still active.  It says it never expires.  And nothing on the license side has changed.

If anyone has any recommendations on other things I can investigate, I’d greatly appreciate it!

Thanks!
Steve

[scott28tt]

Moderator: Moved to vSphere Hypervisor

[IRIX201110141 · Accepted solution]

Please shutdown the VM first and than try to reduce the vCPU down from 8 to 2 and restart the VM. Be insure that you expand the CPU config widget because the Socket/Core have changed of the past years. It sounds that you try to HotAdd vCPU and this is of couse a license feature which not comes with the free ESXi Hypervisor.

The free ESX Hypervisor only have that max. 8 vCPU limit per VM and not some kind of total # of vCPUs.

Regards,
Joerg

[a_p_]

To rule out issues with the Embedded Host Client, please logout from the ESXi web client, delete the browser cache, and then try to create the VM again.

André

[sferry]

Thank you so much!  I don't know how I missed that. I thought I had tried removing the vCPUs with the machine shut down, but I hadn't.  I followed your suggestions.  They worked perfectly.

Thanks again!