Sorry – just saw your second post, Host-based un-served licensing...

BTW: We use host based licensing

Were the hosts rebooted in between you licensing them and noticing they were unlicensed?

See Primus Solution emc281559

Fact OS: VMware ESXi 5.0 Build 504890

Fact EMC SW: PowerPath/VE 5.7

Symptom ESXi 5.0 reboots PowerPath loses registration.

Symptom PowerPath VE 5.7 does not automatic register.

Symptom PowerPath VE 5.7 is unregistered after the host rebooted.

Symptom ESXi 5.0 host lost PowerPath VE 5.7 license after reboot.

Symptom PowerPath VE 5.7 shows unlicensed state after reboot.

Change After PowerPath VE 5.7 was successfully registered from the remote host/license server, and ESXi 5.0 was rebooted, PowerPath VE is no longer registered.

Fix This is normal behaviour for PowerPath VE 5.7 and it is working as design. PowerPath VE 5.7 supports the automatic license registration feature. As long as the license server/remote server is running with a valid PowerPath VE license, and the rpowermt host= display dev=all command is manually running to manage PowerPath VE, then PowerPath VE will automatically register again if it shows unlicensed earlier.

PP/VE license is not persistent across vSphere host reboot due to VMware limitations. However, on the vSphere host, the PowerPath driver is functional from initial PowerPath/VE installation. There is no concept of unlicensed functionality on the vSphere host with respect to multipathing.

Note PowerPath VE commands excluded from automatic license registration functionality are:

1. rpowermt version

2. rpowermt register

3. rpowermt unregister

4. rpowermt check_registration

5. rpowermt setup

Note Review the PowerPath VE 5.7 Install and Admin guide in the Automatic license registration section and PowerPath VE 5.7 Release Note in "License information persistence across vSphere host reboot" section for reference.

Did you ever get this resolved? Same issue here.

As conor stated above. The "solution" is documented in Primus emc281559.

For me it is not acceptable to relicense a host everytime I reboot it.

Open an SR if you are not satisfied with that. We have an open one on that too.

Regards,

daniel

Agreed. I’ve got a ticket open already as well.

Everybody with the same problem open up an SR with EMC support and raise your voice at https://community.emc.com/message/646671

We also experience the same issue.

Considering the ridiculous price of this product you would expect it to behave correctly. Our hosts all report unlicensed after a reboot. This appears to occur no matter which combination of PP/VE version and ESXi version.

The vast majority of the hosts are ESX5.0u2 running PP/ve Ver5.7 p02.

I'm currently testing PP/VE 5.8 but it appears to behave in the same manner.

Thank you for the follow-up.

In my particular environment I have 30 disparate sites and using one licensing server for all isn't an option. I also didn't want to stand up 30 separate license servers and take up resources plus any manageability overhead that might be associated with it.

In my case, I have 180 hosts in geographically separated areas, most with high latency, low bandwidth links. Having to re-register the licenses upon host reboot via rpowermt isn't ideal. Is there a way to automate this?

I understand ESXi runs in memory, but it also writes back to the bootbank at varying times depending on the component within ESXi (HA config every 10 mins, backups of config once an hour, etc...). Has the option for writing back to the boot bank, or just storing the license file on the scratch partition been looked at?

Thanks.

-Josh Coen

Thanks for the response, Ankur.

I have not tried the appliance. The main reason we went with an unserved configuration is because we did not want to deploy 30 separate appliances, which would have been necessary given the disparate nature of the enterprise.

I would definitely be interested in exploring a scratch option/host profile option. Although I'm aware there would probably need to be some demand behind that before the product manager would consider it.

-Josh