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You are here: Home / VMware Tanzu / Quick Tip - Rebooting VCSA causes vSphere with Tanzu to show ESXi hosts not licensed for Workload Management

Quick Tip - Rebooting VCSA causes vSphere with Tanzu to show ESXi hosts not licensed for Workload Management

11.08.2020 by William Lam // 12 Comments

I had just setup a new vSphere with Tanzu environment running on my Intel NUC for an upcoming blog post and after rebooting the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), I had noticed the Workload Management UI threw the following licensing error:

None of the hosts connected to this vCenter are licensed for Workload Management.

This was quite strange since both the ESXi host and VCSA was just installed less than a day ago which I was using the default 60 day evaluation that is automatically built in.

The even weirder thing was that I was still able perform operations using the Workload Management APIs, so I figured this must be a vSphere UI bug but could not find a way to get the UI to display. After reaching out to some folks internally, a suggestion was given on using either incognito mode or another browser and to my surprise, that fixed the problem! I suspect there is some cookie that was set during the initial Workload Management enablement when going through the evaluation workflow which now causes this unexpected early check for licensing.

I have already filed an internal bug but if you do hit this problem, simply clear your cookies for the the VCSA and the Workload Management UI will not properly display again.

More from my site

  • Quickly deploying vSphere IaaS (formerly vSphere with Tanzu) Control Plane Services via YAMLs
  • Identifying vSphere with Tanzu Managed VMs
  • NVIDIA GPU with Dynamic DirectPath IO (Passthrough) to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster using vSphere with Tanzu
  • How to download offline copy of the Tanzu Kubernetes releases (TKr) Content Library?
  • Building custom Tanzu Kubernetes Releases (TKR) for vSphere with Tanzu

Categories // VMware Tanzu Tags // vSphere Kubernetes Service

Comments

  1. *protectedPaul says

    11/08/2020 at 6:56 am

    HI, I had similar problems after rebooting, but after some time (10 - 15 Minutes) the problem went away..

    Reply
    • *protectedVolker Kurth says

      01/07/2023 at 9:53 am

      I have the exact same error message in a freshly installed vSphere 8 environment.
      But the described workaround doesn‘t work in this case. Any ideas? Or is this a known bug?

      Reply
  2. *protectedChang Wang says

    11/08/2020 at 9:54 pm

    Yes, I am facing the same issue! Thanks !

    Reply
  3. *protectedJean-paul says

    12/17/2020 at 5:00 am

    Thanks for the solution, it works for me.

    Reply
  4. *protectedravinderk1982 says

    02/04/2021 at 1:03 pm

    interesting.. thanks for workout.

    Reply
  5. *protectedAndy says

    03/24/2021 at 6:37 am

    Thanks for this. Bug still present in 7.0.2

    Reply
  6. *protectedGuido Nilgen says

    09/08/2021 at 12:44 am

    Still have this Issue, sucks* 7.02

    Reply
  7. *protectedMatt says

    10/06/2021 at 7:51 am

    Excellent solution, worked perfectly

    Reply
  8. *protectedbyungmun lee says

    10/05/2022 at 6:25 pm

    Does restarting vCenter Server affect already deployed supervisor clusters or workload clusters?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/05/2022 at 7:30 pm

      No

      Reply
  9. *protectedkurthv71 says

    01/09/2023 at 3:39 am

    I have the exact same error message in a freshly installed vSphere 8 environment.
    But the described workaround doesn‘t work in this case.
    Any ideas? Or is this a known bug?

    Reply
    • *protectedAdmit says

      11/06/2023 at 2:15 am

      Hi Kurthv71,
      I also have the same problem, did you find a solution?
      I checked logs, added licenses and restarted vCenter but no luck!

      Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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