Cleaning decommissioned ESXi host from licensing, vSphere Client shows the error "There are expired or expiring licenses in your inventory"

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• vSphere Client shows license expired banner for each login attempt to vCenter - "There are expired or expiring licenses in your inventory".
• Licenses Tab (Administration -> Licenses) shows expired Evaluation License and selecting the Evaluation License -> Hosts shows stale ESXi host entries which are no longer available in the inventory.
  
  

Environment

• vCenter Server 7.x
• vCenter Server 8.x

Resolution

Manually remove the stale ESXi host license entries from vCenter Server by following below steps:

1. Install JXplorer utility by following the procedure Using JXplorer to connect to the vSphere Single Sign-on.
   
   Use LDAP method to connect to vCenter.
   
   
   
2. Expand Services -> LicenseService
   
   
   
   
3. Check each entry starts with AssetEntity_host-<ID>-<UUID> and verify the property vmwLicSvcAssetName to locate the stale host name.
   
   
   
   
4. Property vmwLicSvcAssetLicenseId will show as EvaluationLicenseId for the hosts with Evaluation License.
   
   
   
   
5. Remove the AssetEntity_host-<ID>-<UUID> value if the property vmwLicSvcAssetName is matching to the stale hostname which needs to be removed from Licenses.
   1. Right-click on the entry to remove.
   2. Select Delete.
      
      
      
      
   3. Click OK to delete the entry.
      
      
      
      
6. Logout and login back to vSphere Client to confirm the expired license banner is disappeared.