Resolving unexpected License capacity requirements in VCF Operations

Products

• VCF Operations

Issue/Introduction

• When attempting to assign a license in VCF Operations, you receive an error stating that the allocated capacity must be X cores.

  • vCenter Server reports more unlicensed cores in VCF Operations. However if we count cores on esxi manually it is significantly less.

  • The esxi hosts are virtualized/nested hosts

Environment

VCF Operations 9.0

Cause

There is a key licensing rule mentioned in Counting Cores for VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation and TiBs for vSAN states that a minimum of 16 physical cores for each CPU (physical processor) in the ESXi hosts are licensed, even if a CPU has fewer than 16 cores.

Resolution

• To align the license consumption with your actual resource usage, you must adjust the virtual hardware configuration of your ESXi hosts.

  1. Shut down the nested ESXi hosts.

  2. Edit Settings for each virtual machine.

  3. Modify the CPU topology to increase the number of cores per socket while decreasing the total number of sockets.

     • Example: Change from 16 sockets with 1 core each to 1 socket with 16 cores.

  4. Power on the hosts and refresh VCF Operations.

  By consolidating the cores into a single socket, VCF will see 1 socket × 16 cores (meeting the minimum).