vSAN Witness Appliance incorrectly assigned VCF or commercial ESXi license

Products

• VMware vSAN 7.x
• VMware vSAN 8.x

Issue/Introduction

• A vSAN Witness Appliance incorrectly consumes commercial license capacity (e.g., core usage 16) in vCenter Server under Configure > Licensing.
• The appliance does not display the expected "vSphere 8 for Virtual SAN Witness for Embedded OEMs" license with 1 CPU usage.
• The following command on the witness host confirms the appliance state, yet it remains tied to standard licenses: esxcfg-advcfg -g /Misc/vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance Value of vsanWitnessVirtualAppliance is 1
• Standard vSphere or VCF license cores are unnecessarily utilized by the virtual appliance rather than available for physical ESXi hosts.

Environment

• VMware vSAN 7.x
• VMware vSAN 8.x

 

Cause

The vSAN Witness Appliance OVA includes a free, embedded OEM license. If a standard commercial license key is manually assigned to the witness appliance, the embedded license is permanently overwritten. vCenter Server does not provide a mechanism to restore or re-select the original embedded license once it has been replaced by a commercial key.

Resolution

Redeploy the vSAN Witness Appliance to restore the embedded license and reclaim commercial license capacity for physical ESXi hosts.

1. Deploy a new vSAN Witness Appliance using the OVA template that matches the current environment's vSAN version.
2. Replace the existing witness host in the cluster configuration by following the procedure: Change the Witness Host.
3. Verify that the newly deployed appliance automatically applies the embedded "vSphere 8 for Virtual SAN Witness for Embedded OEMs" license upon being added to vCenter.

For environments managed by vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), reconfigure it to manage the new witness node: Witness node is managed by vLCM (326712).

Additional Information

Unlike physical hosts, the vSAN Witness Appliance does not require a dedicated commercial license. While applying a standard license is technically supported, it is discouraged as it consumes paid capacity. To receive updates on licensing changes or fixes, Subscribe to this article.