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

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.