On twitter John Troyer retweeted a question a couple of days ago which basically came down to the following: When your VM which contains the license server goes down and has been down for longer then 14 days you will not be able to actually boot it up. This is because the grace period has expired.
As a VMware PSO Consultant my recommendation is to make sure you always have a “host based” license file laying around. In a normal situation you don’t need to use it. But in a situation like this it will be very useful because you can just change the license to a host based license instead of a “license server”. This would enable you to actually boot up the License VM. When booted up you could easily revert the changes again and point to your license server again.
You could also put the host the VM is on into evaluation mode. If I remember correctly, you should still have remaining days unless you used them all up before officially ‘licensing’ that host.
Or keep a backup copy of the VM you made with VMware Converter on a removable disk and boot up VMware Workstation or Server with the VM and have at it.
I wish Converter could be scripted, just for this occasion. I’d love to have last nights copy of the VirtualCenter VM handy on my VMware Server box just in case.
mike
What about vCenter Hearthbeat or Neverfail?
In bigger environments I allways consider creating a “Management Services” HA cluster of 2 ESX hosts with host-based licenses which run all management services (vCenter, License Server, Database, AD etc.) then you won’t run into problems like this.
Off course this, just like vCenter Heartbeat/Neverfail or a hostbased license on standby, only prevents hardware-related issues. Keeping a backup VM like Mike suggests is always a good practice to prevent software-related issues with a License or vCenter server.
vCenter hearthbeat/Neverfail is designed for creating vCenter clusters accross sites etc.