Reset ESXi VMware Evaluation license to 60 days.

Today my lab evalaution license was end with 0 days remaining; I found good way to reset your VMware licence evaluation mode back to 60 days so you can use it for more 60 days & reset again after 60 days.

now there is no need to format / reinstall your ESXi & vCenter to reset your licence.

Note: I will not suggest this to use in your production environment but you can use it for your lab.

here are the steps below:

Reset licence on ESXi host:

A) For ESX 4  & ESXi 4 , 5

1. Login to the TSM through SSH or Shell
2. Remove the following two files:
3. /etc/vmware/vmware.lic
4. /etc/vmware/license.cfg
5. Reboot server

use below command to do the task

# m -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

#reboot

B) For ESXi 5.1, 5.5 & 6

For ESXi 5.1 and ESXi 5.5, you may need to continually remove the license files as the server reboots for this to work.  The following should do this quite nicely:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

rm -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

reboot ; while true ; do

    rm -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

done

An alternative shows that restarting the services should works just as well as rebooting the server: 

# For ESXi 5.0

rm -f /etc/vmware/vmware.lic /etc/vmware/license.cfg

services.sh restart

# For ESXi 5.1

rm -r /etc/vmware/license.cfg

cp /etc/vmware/.#license.cfg /etc/vmware/license.cfg

/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

The alternative also shows a method for resetting the trial license while connected to vCenter server.  I still think removing and re-adding the ESXi server is cleaner.

Update: 25/08/2015

use below command for 5.1

rm -r /etc/vmware/license.cfg
cp /etc/vmware/.#license.cfg /etc/vmware/license.cfg
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Reset ESXi Licence

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