(480 Milestone 9) - ConnorEast/Tech-Journal GitHub Wiki

Issue During Lab:

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vCenter Server and the ESXi host both run on 60-day evaluation licenses. Both had expired, which caused the ESXi host to show as Disconnected in vCenter and blocked all PowerCLI operations like New-VM. What We Tried First We attempted to assign the license through the vCenter UI under Administration → Licensing → Assets, but the UI was broken — it would only show the expired Evaluation License in the assignment dialog and wouldn't display the valid license we already had in inventory. This is a known vCenter 8 bug where the license manager UI fails to show compatible licenses for assignment after expiry. Why the First Key Didn't Work for vCenter The key 4F40H-4ML1K-M89U0-0C2N4-1AKL4 is a vSphere 8 Enterprise license, which licenses ESXi hosts — not vCenter Server itself. VMware sells them separately. Even though it worked fine on the ESXi host, vCenter rejected it with licenseKey parameter not correct because it's the wrong product type. What Finally Fixed It The key 4F282-0MLD2-M8869-T89G0-CF240 is a vSphere 8 Standard license that covers vCenter Server specifically. We assigned it directly via PowerCLI using the LicenseAssignmentManager API, bypassing the broken UI entirely: 

powershell$lam.AddLicense("4F282-0MLD2-M8869-T89G0-CF240", $null)
$lam2.UpdateAssignedLicense($si.Content.About.InstanceUuid, "4F282-0MLD2-M8869-T89G0-CF240", $null)
This programmatically added the key to the license inventory and assigned it directly to the vCenter instance using its UUID, which the UI was incapable of doing in its expired state. The Takeaway VMware vSphere requires two separate license keys — one for each ESXi host and one for vCenter Server. They are different products and different key formats. When both expire simultaneously, the UI becomes partially or fully unusable, and you have to fall back to the PowerCLI API to recover.
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Lab:

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