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Monday, November 15, 2010

Problems installing Nexus 1000v license with error message: “Installing license failed: License host-id doesn't match license file”

We ran into an interesting issue during installing the Nexus 1000v which we ended up calling VMware for support and I thought this post might be useful if anyone experiences the same issue. This isn’t our first Nexus 1000v deployment so we went ahead and opened up the Cisco registration site to put in a request with our Product Authorization Key then wait for our license to be emailed back to us. We got the license file (.lic) within the hour and proceeded to install the license but ran into the following error:

Installing license failed: License host-id doesn't match license file

We weren’t sure what was going on after troubleshooting for 30 minutes, we decided it would be faster to just call VMware. The engineer had us open up the LIC file and that’s when we noticed that the host ID shown was actually missing 4 characters at the end. We’re not sure how it got truncated as we had 2 sets of eyes reviewing the host ID so I’m not sure if it’s us missing it or perhaps there was something wrong with the Cisco site. The VMware engineer was extremely helpful offering to open a call Cisco himself and within 10 minutes or so, a Cisco engineer got on the line and regenerated the license for us.

So if you ever run into this error message, one of the easiest things to check is to simply open up the LIC file you received and see if it matches your host ID.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This just happened to me, think I figured out how. Did you paste VDH= then delete it out, if so it shortens the number of numerics that get pasted

Terence Luk said...

I faintly remember doing that but never thought twice about it. This may be the reason why our key was truncated.