Multiple vSAN Witness Appliances share the same vSAN license key in vCenter Server

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

When deploying multiple vSAN Witness Appliances from the provided OVA for 2-Node or Stretched Cluster topologies, the Witness hosts may display the exact same vSphere license key in the vCenter Server inventory.  When attempting to assign or modify the license of a vSAN Witness Appliance within the vCenter Server UI, administrators may encounter the following warning message:

"You are about to change the embedded OEM licenses of some assets and you might be unable to assign back these licenses at a later stage. Contact your hardware vendor for confirmation."

Environment

• VMware vCenter Server 8.x, 9.x

• VMware vSAN (Stretched Cluster or 2-Node configurations)

• vSAN Witness Appliance

Cause

This is expected behavior and a built-in safety mechanism in vCenter Server.

The vSAN Witness Appliance is provided as a virtual appliance (OVA) that includes a free, embedded OEM license. This embedded license eliminates the need for an additional vSAN license.

Because this license key is embedded within the appliance during deployment rather than manually added to the vCenter license inventory, overwriting it is a destructive action. vCenter displays this warning to alert that replacing the embedded license with a standard commercial key will erase the free license from the asset, and it cannot be re-selected from the license inventory later.

Resolution

Depending on the current state of the environment, proceed with one of the following actions:

Scenario A: The warning is currently displayed (Action not yet taken)

1. Click Cancel on the license assignment wizard.

2. Do not assign a standard, paid vSphere commercial license to the vSAN Witness Appliance. The embedded license is valid for the life of the appliance and does not consume your purchased CPU capacity.

Scenario B: The embedded license was already overwritten If a commercial license was applied and the embedded license was lost, it cannot be recovered through the vCenter Server UI. To resolve this and reclaim your paid vSphere license, deploy a new vSAN Witness Appliance from the official OVA template. The newly deployed appliance will contain a fresh embedded license. Follow standard procedures in the vSAN documentation to replace the existing witness in the cluster configuration.

Additional Information

For further details on vSAN Witness Appliance deployment and licensing constraints, refer to the official vSAN Planning and Deployment Guide and the vSAN Stretched Cluster Guide. Applying a standard vSphere license to a Witness Appliance is fully supported but is generally discouraged, as it unnecessarily consumes paid ESXi host licensing for a specialized appliance entitled to run for free.