vSAN Clusters showing Expired License after a vCenter upgrade.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

You have upgraded your environment a major revision (7 to 8) starting with vCenter. After some time, the vSAN licenses report as expired and prevent the power on and migration of virtual machines under those clusters that are still running on ESXi 7.0.

Cause

vSAN licensing is tied to the version of the vCenter server. If you are running vCenter 8.0 you will need to use vSAN 8 licensing for all clusters under the vCenter. Because of this when you upgrade vCenter from 7 to 8 for example, by default the vSAN clusters will be assigned an evaluation license, and if that license expires before you add the vSAN 8 license this situation will occur.

Resolution

Get the correct vSAN licenses from your entitlements in the Broadcom portal, install the license, and apply it to the impacted clusters.