Hot on the heels of Broadcom’s announcement of the end of perpetual licences for VMware it has given customers barely a week to download any keys for licenses from its portal with expired support. This is due to Broadcom migrating all licence keys from the VMware portal into its own software management portal.
There are several impacts here affecting multiple stakeholders. Firstly, if you don’t keep your own records of licenses with expired support, you will lose the ability to reactivate the software should you need to reinstall or perhaps migrate to a different host. Secondly, if Broadcom no longer have records of your licenses this may cause issues during an audit. Additionally, folder structures from the VMware portal, which infrastructure teams often create to keep track of which keys are assigned to which server farms and clusters, will be transitioned to a flat structure. Furthermore, any notes associated with license keys will be lost.
Broadcom start the transition on Tuesday April 30th at 5PM PDT. You must take all actions listed above prior to that date as it appears that the VMware systems will no longer be accessible after that time
Broadcom estimate that the transition will complete by Sunday May 5th 7:30PM PDT
During the transition phase (April 30th to May 5th) your VMware teams will not have access to license keys unless you’ve downloaded them. This could have an operational impact should servers need rebuilding or reactivating in that time.
Broadcom announcement: https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleNumber=282163
VMware support note on generating license reports: https://kb.VMware.com/s/article/2043472
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