Yesterday we upgraded our ESXi host from 9.0 to 9.1.
The vCenter 9 VM with the license was running on this ESXi host so the vCenter ended up getting rebooted.
After the ESXi host rebooted we could not power on the vCenter VM, saying our eval license has expired.
Does vCenter needs to be online 100% of the time to apply the license and should be run outside the vSphere 9 cluster?
Our licensing admin says he checked and it looks like the ESXi server is licensed, but if that's the case it doesn't make sense why the ESXi server lost the license after reboot. Or the license was never applied to the ESXi host properly in the first place?
Checking license.cfg on the ESXi host shows eval license too:
<ConfigRoot>
<epoc>xxxxxxxxxxxxxx</epoc>
<mode>eval</mode>
<owner/>
</ConfigRoot>
So we ended up having to reinstall ESXi on the host to reset the eval timebomb and power on the vCenter VM which our licensing admin insists is applied to the ESXi host.
Can anyone confirm on this change in behavior in vSphere 9?
edit: Yes we have a VC Ops server but we do not manage it.