For most customers, a single VCF License Server, which is automatically deployed as part of a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) deployment, is sufficient to provide centralized license management for all VCF components. A single VCF License Server and VCF Operations instance can manage both VCF and VVF entitlements, so deploying additional VCF License Servers provides no additional benefit.
While additional VCF License Servers (LS) can certainly be deployed, the primary use cases are replacing an existing VCF LS or supporting extreme edge deployments where vCenter Server has limited connectivity to the primary data center and requires a VCF LS to be co-located with the edge deployment.
The VCF LS is provided as a virtual appliance in OVA format. The typical deployment workflow uses vCenter Server, where the VCF LS uses OVF properties, like most virtual appliances, to configure itself during deployment.
With that said, if you need to deploy the VCF LS directly to an ESX host, this is certainly possible using OVF Tool, which can inject the required OVF properties as part of the deployment workflow.
To demonstrate the VCF LS deployment workflow directly to an ESX host, I have created a simple shell script, which you can also augment to deploy to vCenter Server.
Step 1 - Download the deploy_vcf_license_server.sh script to your local system. You will also need to have the VCF LS OVA already downloaded, either using VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) or Broadcom Support Portal (BSP).
Step 2 - Login to VCF Operations and navigate to Manage > Licensing > Licenses & Registration > Manage > License Servers and select Add License Server and copy the time-bound registration code, which is needed to automatically register the newly deployed VCF LS to your VCF Operations instance.
Note: If you wish to retrieve the VCF Operations registration code programmatically, go to the end of the blog post for more details.
Step 3 - Update the deployment variables within the deploy_vcf_license_server.sh script including the registration code from the previous step and then run the script as shown in screenshot below.
The deployment will take a few minutes and once the VCF LS has been successfully configured, it will automatically register itself with your VCF Operations with a random UUID (you will be able to rename this when you register it with the VCF Business Service console).
As part of completing the VCF LS registration workflow, you will have the ability to rename the deployed VCF LS along with assigning the desired VCF and/or VVF license entitlements.
If you are interested in retrieving the VCF Operations registration code for the VCF LS deployment, I have updated my Broadcom.Community.VCFLicensing PowerShell module to include a new function called Get-VcfOperationsRegistrationKey
Here is an example of connecting to your VCF Operations instance to retrieve the registration code using the Powershell module:
Import-Module Broadcom.Community.VCFLicensing $VCF_OPERATIONS_HOSTNAME="vcf01.vcf.lab" $VCF_OPERATIONS_USERNAME="admin" $VCF_OPERATIONS_PASSWORD='VMware1!VMware1!' Connect-VcfOperations -Fqdn $VCF_OPERATIONS_HOSTNAME -User $VCF_OPERATIONS_USERNAME -Password $VCF_OPERATIONS_PASSWORD Get-VcfOperationsRegistrationKey
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