recently i needed to update the licensing on two 5.x esxi hosts with expired licenses. interestingly enough, it appeared as though the task could not be accomplished from the windows vsphere client. i couldn’t apply the licenses in vcenter either since vcenter was a vm that was currently down (because of the expired host licenses).

this wasn’t an environment that i actively managed so i’m not sure of the specifics on how these hosts were set up. anyways, the licenses can be applied over SSH if you use vi to edit the text file: /etc/vmware/vmware.lic. no reboot or restart of services appears to be necessary.

source:
https://pario.no/2013/05/17/howto-enter-vmware-esxi-license-key-after-it-has-expired/

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