Solution to a VMware license problem

I'd been having a problem with our VirtualCenter installation: I'd removed an ESX server from the inventory, then tried to add it back. This operation would fail with an error message of "There are not enough licenses to perform the operation", and an event would show up reading "Not enough CPU licenses".

Now, we have plenty of VC agent licenses, (especially since I'd just removed that same server from the inventory) so I opened a call with VMware. After making the mistake of calling it a license problem (which bounced me to a FlexLM-only support group that couldn't bounce me back -- but they did validate the license file I was using, and verify that yes, we are really licensed) I was able to talk to a moderately useful representative.

We walked through the log collection process, gathered a bunch of data, discovered a corrupt VM in the inventory (removed it), gathered more logs, and I went home for the day. The next morning, the ESX server added with no problems. So I closed the case.

Now, over the weekend, we had one of our ESX servers die. I got paged and was told (third-hand: the user reported to ops who reported to another SE who told me) that something was wrong with $otherserver. Oh well, I logged in and could tell what they were complaining about -- $server was unresponsive. Unfortunately, I hadn't turned on HA on that cluster, so it didn't fix itself automatically, and I wasn't able to migrate the VMs to the other host (the VMs are on shared disk) So I deleted $server, added the VMs to the inventory via $otherserver, booted the VMs, and went on with my thanksgiving.

Today, when I booted $server (power was off, and I didn't have the DRAC configured, also the KVM was unplugged -- I think this was the original problem) and tried to add it back to the inventory, *POOF* same "There are not enough licenses to perform the operation". So do I open another mostly-useless support call? No! I'll fix it myself this time.

`strings -10 /usr/lib/vmware/vpx/vpxa | grep / | more` eventually found the config file /etc/vmware/vpxa.cfg. I "service vmware-vpxa stop" and then mv'd that config file to a backup, and added the server back in.

And the fscking thing worked. Grr. The newly-created vpxa.cfg file is exactly identical to the old one too.

--Joe