For most users, you probably have a large collection of vSphere license keys that have been provisioned over the years and keeping track of the product SKU, entitled features and capacity can be a challenge, especially if you are just looking at the raw 25 character license string.
While the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) is recommended for all license management operations(view, split, merge, etc), did you know you could also use vCenter Server to help decode a particular license key?
vSphere 8.0 Update 2b was just released last week and with this release, customers can now take advantage of the new included 100 GiB trial vSAN storage capacity for each deployed VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) core for use with vSAN!
Note: If you would like to understand how much vSAN storage you are entitled to (100GiB for VVF and 1TiB for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)), check out the new inventory and calculator script in KB 95927 (brownfield) and KB 96426 (greenfield) for more details.
In addition to installing and/or updating your vCenter Server to vSphere 8.0 Update 2b, you will also need to login to Customer Connect to download your new VVF and/or VCF license keys that will activate your vSAN entitlement.
I have already received questions on how to determine whether an ESXi host has been licensed with the new VVF and/or VCF license keys and which you can do so by using the vSphere UI by navigating to Administration->Licensing->Licenses->Assets->Hosts or vSAN Clusters and using the various filters, but this can be time consuming when you have a large environment with various license editions.
This is where automation and vSphere API can help!
I recently got reacquainted with the Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager (ASLCM) solution, which makes it super easy for anyone to manage the deployment, configuration and lifecycle for the complete Aria suite of products including Aria Identity, Aria Operations, Aria Operations for Logs and Aria Automation.
Users can deploy the various Aria products in either standalone or clustered mode (for high availability purposes), with the former being ideal for learning and homelab purposes. In addition to deploying ASLCM and the individual Aria products, I wanted to also use this as an opportunity explore the ASLCM REST API and what better way to learn than to have a use case to get hands on experience.
While ASLCM already provides a simple way to deploy Aria products using the UI and includes a nice export/import feature for an environment configuration in JSON, I wanted to do the same, but programmatically using the ASLCM REST API to fully configure the environment.
