Today I had to check up on some license keys for a customer. There was not a complete state of keys, enterprise accounts and support contracts so I started looking into how to collect data.
This may be common knowledge to many but VMware has this nifty tool on my.vmware.com:
https://www.vmware.com/support/serialNumberTrack.portal
Here you plop in your key and it returns support contract, type and which EA number it is connected to.
To get all the keys of a vCenter the following piece of PowerCLI can be used:
$licman = Get-View (Get-View ServiceInstance).Content.LicenseManager $licman.Licenses | Select LicenseKey, EditionKey
This returns the list of keys on the vCenter easy to copy paste into the tracking tool. Nifty!
And a sane – clean, well structured inventory in My.VMware should never be underestimated. I know its boring, but as it grows, it is often forgotten …
Indeed – structuring my.vmware.com license portal helps a lot! But I do wish they would make it easier to move around keys. Have been moving around VSPP keys lately and having to click 4-5-6 times to move a single key out of 50-60 is tedious at best! Perhaps an API would help 🙂