Witness hosts in 9.x require to be manually tagged as a witness host for the witness license to be applied

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

In 9.x, for the Physical witness host to run the witness appliance VM or a Bare metal host being used as a witness host, the physical host needs to be tagged for witness license manually before adding it to vCenter inventory. Otherwise, the witness license with license name "VSAN Witness Evaluation Mode" will NOT be assigned to the witness host.

This is also true for upgrades as well from 8.x to 9.x.

When converting a witness host back to a regular host you will have to un-tag the witness license from the host.

 

 

Environment

VMware vSAN 9.x

Cause

This is by Design for 9.x releases.

Resolution

SSH to the physical host to be used as a witness host or the witness appliance VM will reside, and run the below command to tag it for the witness license

"esxcli vsan witness license set --enable true"

To convert the physical host back to a standard host, use the below command to un-tag the witness license

"esxcli vsan witness license set --enable false"

Note: A reboot is required after running the commands to either tag or un-tag the witness license.

To check the current witness license setting

esxcli vsan witness license get

NOTE: Free physical Witness host licensing using this method is only applicable to 9.x. Any physical Witness host running 8.x will need to be licensed using regular licensing methods.

In very rare cases, you might see a false positive alarm "License assignment failed for this host"

Due to a difference in the license entitlement formats in VCF 9.0 and VCF 9.1 and later, after an upgrade to vCenter 9.1, in the vSphere Client you might see the alarm:

 

"License assignment failed for this host"

 

This is a false positive alarm, because a license is provided but not auto-acknowledged upon successful licensing. The alarm does not indicate a broken workload or function.

 

Workaround: Confirm that the host is licensed and acknowledge the alarm.