A first step in a vRealize Automation implementation is quite often a Proof of Concept. The POC can help you to verify if vRA suits your business case. During the POC most of the time an vRA evaluation license is used.vRA evaluation licenses are most of the time dedicated vRA licenses (e.g. vRA advanced for 100 VMs) and not vCloud Suite licenses.

If you want to convert your POC environment to a production environment you might have a challenge when you want to change/upgrade your licenses to vCloud Suite licenses.This process involves two steps:

Change the license on the vRA IAAS (Windows) server. Change the license on your vRA appliance;

The first step in this process is described in VMware knowledge article 2076129. The second step involves some undocumented steps. If you try to upload a vCloud Suite license to vRA while a vRA (VM based) license is already active you will get the error Unable to downgrade existing license edition:

Apparently vRA thinks a vCloud Suite is a downgrade from the existing evaluation license and this is not allowed.

Solution: Remove existing licenses

The solution is to remove all existing licenses from the vRA appliance and then add the vCloud Suite license to you vRA installation. Removing licenses from vRA currently involves some editing in the vRA vPostgres database.

Notice: Although the process worked for me, it’s without any warranty and of course use at own risk. Making a snapshot before removing existing licenses sounds like a pretty good idea…

First copy existing license keys you want to preserve from the VAMI interface (https://VRA:5480/); Stop the vRA service from the command line of the vRA appliance: /etc/init.d/vcac-server stop; Connect to the vRA postgres database, some information on how to do this in this article; Delete all the information in the embeddedlicenseentry table. Execute the following query in the postgres client (psql): delete from embeddedlicenseentry; Start vRA again: /etc/init.d/vcac-server start; After the vRA services are up and running (this can take a few minutes), open the VAMI interface and enter the new license keys.

Deleting all the information from the embeddedlicenseentry table resets the licensing configuration for vRealize Automation.

That’s all! Kudos to Jan Willem Lammers of VMware for digging some information out of the VMware organization on this topic.