Customers encountering an "Invalid license key" error when applying a license key generated on or after April 20, 2026, are affected by a known validation defect for the following skus
This issue impacts VMware Live Recovery (VLR), VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and VMware Cloud Director Availability (VCDA) SKUs. This article provides the necessary steps to resolve this license recognition failure.
A change in the Broadcom licensing system intended to address Term based data protection license incorrectly provisiong resulted in a license key format that older software versions do not recognize. The validation logic in these versions fails to parse the updated license structure, resulting in an "Invalid license key" error.
To resolve this issue, you must upgrade your appliance to a version containing the updated license validation libraries.
Note: This upgrade is mandatory to ensure the product correctly recognizes the new license definition. If the issue persists after the upgrade, perform a "split" and "merge" operation in the Broadcom Support Portal to refresh the license metadata.