Demo: Licensing vCenter and ESXi - vSphere Tutorial

- [Rick] In this video, I'll demonstrate how to manage licenses inside of the vSphere client for a vSphere 6.7 environment. So here you can see I'm logged into the labs at hol.vmware.com. And I'm utilizing one of the labs here for software defined data center. So there's great labs here at hol.vmware.com and the best part about 'em is they're free. So I'm using one of those lab environments and I'm at the home screen of our HTML5 vSphere Client. This is the non-flash client, and some of you may be more familiar with the traditional vSphere Web Clients, so this is a good chance to get a feel for the new client. I'm going to go to the administration area of the vSphere Client and under administration, we have licenses. So you can see here, I've kind of minimized a few things. My recent tasks or alarms are normally down here at the bottom. I just hit these two little arrows to move them out of the way to give myself a little bit more room to work with. So before I take a look at these licenses, let's go to assets, and you can see here, I've got to a couple of vCenter servers. I've got some ESXi hosts. I don't have any clusters. And I don't have any other VMware solutions that I need to license. So let's take a look at my vCenter servers. And I'll click on this first vCenter server here. You can see right here I've got a vCenter Server 6 Standard license applied to this vCenter server. And if I look at my other vCenter server, we should see something very similar. I've got a vCenter Server 6 Standard license applied. And then if I look at my hosts, here's where we're going to see, potentially, an Enterprise Plus license. So here we go, we've got Enterprise Plus licensing edition enabled for these ESXi hosts. That's the type of license key that is assigned. And so that's where I get all my features from. Enterprise Plus has a whole bunch of features that vSphere standard does not have. So I can see which license keys are assigned to which asset here, under assets. Under products, I can see what I'm licensed for. I've got vSphere with Operations Management 6 Enterprise Plus and vCenter Server 6 Standard. Now this is a 6.7 environment. These license keys are applicable to 6.7. So let's go back to licenses, and let's take a quick look at how we manage these licenses. Here's my vCenter license, and here's my vSphere Enterprise Plus license. So I have these two licenses, so if I check this box next to license, I can potentially rename it or I could potentially remove it. If the license key is not assigned to anything, I can go ahead and remove it. If the license key is still assigned to some of my assets, then I can't remove it. So what I could do, is I could go to one of these assets, I could choose any ESXi host, and under assign license, I could pick which license I want to actually have assigned to that host. And if I pick Evaluation License, then I'm basically unassigning that other license from it. So I'm just going to hit cancel there, go back to licenses. So I can just check the box next to any of these licenses to manage them, and I can also click on this little box to add new licenses. And so I'm going to put in the license key here, but I'm going to pause my recording while I do that because I don't want to give my license key to everybody. So I'm going to put in a license key here and hit next. So I put in my license key, I hit next. Here I'm just going to name my license vSphere License Demo. And you can see the vSphere license key below is blanked out, but basically what I added was an Enterprise Plus license key for 10 more processors. So I'm going to go ahead and hit next here, and you can see I've got this new license key here, and if I hit finish, that license key will be imported into my license inventory. I'm actually going to hit cancel here. But once that license key is actually imported into my inventory, I can go over to my assets, like my ESXi hosts. I can check the box next to them, I could go to Assign License, and I could go ahead and assign that new license key to those ESXi hosts. So that explains how to manage licenses using the HTML5 version of the vSphere client.