
John and the rest of the team were getting frustrated. They were thwarted by errors about insufficient license capacity.Īt this point, clicking OK didn’t help matters. When the team selected one of the 1 CPU vSAN Standard licenses to assign to the cluster, it was easy to see the Usage column showed 4 CPUs but that Capacity was only 1 CPU. The other 4 licenses have been added as options to assign to the cluster. Notice the evaluation license is still assigned to the cluster. After clicking the Assign License button above and entering all license keys, here’s what the team saw. When the licenses for vSAN were originally issued, the team was sent 4 different 1 CPU license keys for vSAN. “Any host moved into the cluster will then get the vSAN license applied by default.” The screenshot here shows the cluster was using 4 CPUs of vSAN (contained all of their ReadyNodes) and was still operating in evaluation mode. “Unlike vSphere licenses applied to each host individually, a vSAN license must be applied to the cluster as a whole,” John said. But the mystery began when they tried to apply their licenses to use vSAN. The team knew how to apply the vSphere licenses as well as the vCenter license. Each host would be managed by vCenter Standard. The cluster in question contained 4 hosts, each with a single physical processor, fully licensed for vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSAN Standard. John also reminded the team to apply the VMware licenses before going any further. Now that the cluster was fully functional, the team was ready to deploy some virtual machines…or so they thought. With vCenter online and hosts updated to the latest patch of ESXi 6.5, they configured the rest of the hosts in the vSAN cluster with all networking needed for vSAN traffic, management, and vMotion. As part of the vCenter Server Appliance installer in vSphere 6.5d and later (vSAN 6.6 and later), they could leverage Easy Install to create a vSAN datastore on some of the hosts and use it to deploy vCenter. They had yet to configure the vSAN cluster.Ī bit of worry set in, but John, the team lead, remembered something. Even though ESXi was installed on the hosts with basic network settings configured, there was no datastore on which to install vCenter. The implementation team gathered to rack and cable the new cluster and all other necessary equipment. After months of planning, some shiny new vSAN ReadyNodes finally arrived at the datacenter.

Excitement was in the air for the technology team of Beast Mode, Inc.
