Enabling VMware licenses

You must enable VMware licenses for the system to be operational.

Before you begin

  • The license that you enable covers all nodes in your environment.
  • You must be assigned the Hardware administration role with permission to Manage hardware resources (Full permission) to perform these steps.
  • When you purchase a new system or upgrade the system model type, you are required to perform the following steps before you can enable VMware licenses.
    1. Complete the VMware Partner Activation Code registration as described in the email you received from the IBM® Customer Service & Support Planner.

      After you complete the registration, VMware sends confirmation of your license order, the VMware vCenter license keys, and the VMware ESXi license keys in multiple emails. In the event you cannot locate the emails, you can download the license keys from the My VMware website.

    2. Combine the license keys for VMware vCenter and VMware ESXi into a single license key by using My VMware. See the documentation for using My VMware to combine license keys in the VMware Knowledge Base.

About this task

You can use the console, the command line interface, or the REST API to complete this task. For the command line and REST API information, see the Related information section.

Procedure

  1. Click System > Product Licenses.
  2. In the VMware licenses section, click none for the vCenter key entry, enter the VMware license key, and press Enter.
    If a previous license value is displayed, you can enter a new value to update the previous one in the system.
    Note:
    • Do not provide multiple keys. Only the last one that you enter is the active license on your system.
    • All IBM Cloud Pak System releases currently use VMware 6.x. If you get a VMware 7.x license instead of a VMware 6.x license, downgrade the license in your system environment by following instructions that are documented in these articles and then use the VMware 6.x license:
    If you do not know the license key that you must enter, you can search for it on the My VMware website as follows:
    1. After you log in, click Accounts.
    2. Select the account that you want, and click Manage License Keys.
    3. Look for the license key number that is listed on the page. Use the following format for the license key: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
  3. In the VMware License Agreement dialog box, click the link for each license, and click Accept.
  4. After you accept all licenses, click OK.
  5. In the message that is displayed, click the link to verify that the job is successful.
  6. Repeat the previous steps for the ESXi key entry.

Results

After the job completed successfully, the system is licensed. The keys are displayed in the VMware licenses section for future reference.