VSM response error – Not licensed for entity

A few weeks ago one customer changed his evaluation licenses for vCenter Server, ESXi, vCloud Director (vCD) and vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) to their newly purchased licenses. The customer runs the most recent versions, at present time 2013-04-12, of vSphere (ESXi 5.1 and VMware vCenter Server 5.1.0b 947939) and VMware vCloud Director (5.1.1 868405).

Everything looked ok in the vCenter Server license section and in the vCloud Director license section.

A couple of days ago the customer couldn’t deploy new vApps. The vApps includs deployment of a VXLAN vNetwork Distributed Switch port group.

The first thing i checked was the licenses but it still looked ok. Next thing to verify was the vCNS Manager to vCenter Server connection and it was all fine.

This was still a proof of concept (POC) environment meaning we could pretty much take whatever actions we wanted. The first actions we took includes:

• vCloud Director to vCenter Server “Reconnect”
  
  
• vCloud Director to vCenter Server “Refresh”
  
• Stopped the vCD cell using the cell-management tool with the below command sequence:
  Check the vCD cell status – /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u administrator -p password cell -t
  Output:
  Job count = 0
  Is Active = true
  Queese the vCD cell – /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u administrator -p password cell -q true
  Stop the vCD cell – /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u administrator -p password cell -s
  Check the vCD cell status once more – /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u administrator -p password cell -t
  Output:
  Job count = 0
  Is Active = false
• Stop the vCD service using the “service vmware-vcd stop” command
• Restarted the vCNS Manager
• Start the vCD service using the “service vmware-vcd start” command

When finished the licensing error was gone during a vApp deployment meaning if you see the “Not licensed for entity” and you know you got the right licenses you can use the actions described above. Maybe you do not need to perform all the actions.

However we received a new vCloud Director error when trying to deploy a vApp:

• “Internal server error”

I wrote a blog post, which can be found here, about how to fix a vCloud Director “Internal server error” message when trying to deploy a vApp the same time as the vCenter Server vpxd.exe process runs heavily on CPU.
This time the vCenter Server vpxd.exe process did not consume more than 1-8% CPU so the solution was no to be found in my other blog post.

We restarted all components included in the vCloud Director setup apart from the database using the below commands and sequence.

• Stop the vCD cell vCD service – service vmware-vcd stop
  
• Shut down vCNS Manager
• Restart the virtual machine running the vCenter Server
• Start the vCNS Manager
• Start the vCD cell vCD service – service vmware-vcd start

When finished we could deploy new vApps without any problems.