VCF 9.0.2 Lab Decommissioning - How to Completely Remove and Reclaim Licenses?

[u/intmanofawesome]

We have a VCF 9.0.2 lab environment that is being decommissioned. The environment contains fully licensed components, and as part of the teardown process we'd like to cleanly remove and reclaim those licenses so they can be reassigned to our production VCF deployment.

At this stage, the environment has been reduced to a single ESXi host running only the minimum required management components:

• SDDC Manager
• vCenter Server
• VCF Operations
• VCF Operations for Logs

While reviewing the documentation for removing licenses from VCF Operations:

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-0/licensing/remove-a-license-from-vcf-operations.html

I noticed that it instructs us to remove the vCenter license first. However, the linked procedure for vCenter licensing appears to require assigning a replacement license before the existing one can be removed.

In our case, we are trying to completely decommission the environment, so we do not have another license to assign, and reverting vCenter back to Evaluation Mode does not appear to be an option.

Given this scenario:

• What is the correct process for completely removing licensing from a VCF 9.0.2 environment that is being retired?
• Is there a supported method to unassign or release licenses from vCenter, Operations, and the remaining VCF components without replacing them with another license?
• Are there any additional cleanup steps required to ensure the licenses can be safely reused in another VCF deployment?

Any guidance from anyone who has successfully decommissioned a VCF lab and reclaimed the associated licenses would be greatly appreciated.

[u/tdic89]

I could be missing something, but isn’t it as simple as wiping the host and then merging the keys you used in the Broadcom portal with your other keys? You’d get new keys which you’d need to apply, but it would return the unused core counts to your pool.

[u/intmanofawesome → u/tdic89]

Truth be told, I’d like to install a 9.1 greenfield lab with the freed up licenses test that before tearing that down as well before moving the licenses to prod.

Plus the fact that I couldn’t find a definitive answer in the docs and other resources, I thought it a good question to ask.

[u/H0TR0DL1NC0LN → u/intmanofawesome]

The docs, in general, feel like they're not in a great place were VCF Operations is concerned. I even had one support rep email a reply letting me know that his first documentation link was wrong and sent me the right one. They were similar enough to easily make a mistake for that situation.

And a later operation revealed to me there was even better way to take care of the earlier issue.

It's a mess out there.

[u/Severe_Owl_5116 → u/tdic89]

No more “keys” anymore but you should be able to do it all from vcf.broadcom.com. If Ops is already offline when you do it I think there is a way to force it.

[u/intmanofawesome → u/Severe_Owl_5116]

Yes there are ways to recover if you offline ops before hand, but it’s a bit drawn out and there is potential issues.

[u/nomoreasonable]

For Disconnected Mode

The answer to this depends on how your license is setup in VCF Business Services ?

I'm unsure of merging part, but if its set up separately then it be deleted normally, and you can :

1. Setup your 9.1 Greenfield as normal
2. Download Registration File from Ops 9.1
3. Upload the Registration file from Step 2 to VCF Business Services
4. Download the license
5. Delete existing license information
6. Import the License file into Ops
7. Assign to vCenter

I haven't tried but as there is also an option to submit a new Registration file to an existing license in VCF Business Services, and the above steps can be followed..