The Unlicensed license for host…

Recently I spent some time upgrading our corporate VMware environment from ESX4.1 to ESXi 5. Fun times I know. For most of the hosts, I was able to use the update manager to upgrade and only one host was short on space that required a full re-install from CD.

The upgrades weren’t without incident. I had the unfortunate incident of running into an error of “The Unlicensed license for host does not include vSphere HA. Upgrade the License”.

Doesn’t my ESXi 5 license include all the bells and whistles? Yes, yes it does. It wasn’t until I dug into this one a bit deeper that I noticed that the vCenter was reporting this for the host:

When looking at the console, you can clearly see that its a 5.0 host.

The Fix!

Luckily, the fix is really easy. Simply remove the host from your vCenter and re-add. Sure you’ll need to re-add it to your dVS if you have one and re-attach your host profile if you are using those. But in the end, its thankfully a very painless fix to what I would call a bug.