This Will Be A Short Post…

 

I recently upgraded our vCenter server from vCenter 4.1 Update 1 to vCenter 4.1 Update 2. The upgrade was very smooth and I cannot find anything to complain about in regards to the upgrade process: just start the installer and click next until your finger falls off. Rinse and repeat for every vCenter component, reboot and enjoy!

 

However, a few weeks later down the road, one of our LAN Admins rebooted an old ESXi 3.5 servers that we still have lying around the server farm (because they have 32 bit cpus we can’t upgrade them to ESXi 4.1).

 

After the reboot, he could access the server anymore via the vSphere client. This is the error he saw:

 

The license server is not configured to perform the operation

 

And this is a screenshot of the error:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Was The Root Cause?

 

Basically speaking, any “license server” errors should point you toward the “VMware License Server” service on the vCenter server.  If that service is not running or not configured properly, you’ll get some weird errors after rebooting a “Pre ESXi 4.x” server.

 

In my case, the service was running fine. I restarted it but it didn’t resolve it. Since I had upgraded the vCenter server recently from ESXi 4.1 Update 1 to ESXi 4.1 Update 2, I decided to check the configuration…

 

And my settings were gone:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Simple Solution

 

Well, to resolve this, here’s what I simply had to do:

 

  1. I started my vSphere client and logged into my vCenter server.
  2. I clicked on the menu “Administration → vCenter Server Settings…”.
  3. In the “Licensing” section, I typed “vcenter.uu.com:27000″ and clicked on OK (replace the hostname with the one of your own licensing server).
  4. I waited 5 minutes.
  5. I right-clicked on the host in the inventory that was disconnected and selected “Reconnect”.
  6. Presto, the server got reconnected…

 

In fact, you can check the messages in the “Recent Tasks” view to see what’s cooking:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion?

 

Well, that was an easy thing to troubleshoot… I just wanted to share in case it helps someone somewhere.

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Marc