I have a question, that somehow support does not seem to know the answer.
I brought a 320 Socket license.
I added a few vCenters, and within those vcenters, there are over hundreds of ESX host.
At the time of purchase, this 320 license count was recommended by solarwinds.
Now, after having expanded and deploying more ESX, the VIM is alerting me for max license usage. That is a given, if the ESX host are automatically taking up license count when added into vCenter.
What I am finding out is that SolarWinds VIM does not have the capability to 'manage' the socket license directly on the VIM module. Techinical support is telling me I must manage the license from vCenter itself. It just does not make sense, how am I supposed to manage the ESX host license count from vCenter? Am I supposed to enable monitoring from vCenter if I want to monitor with VIM, then remove from vCenter if I do not? This sounds so backward.
Virtualization Manager Licensing Model
Exclude hosts from monitoring
If there are not enough SolarWinds Virtualization Manager licenses to cover every powered on virtual machine managed by a vCenter server, change the access permissions of the vCenter user account to limit what it can access.
Restricting the virtual machines accessible by the user account reduces the number of virtual machines or sockets SolarWinds Virtualization Manager can collect data from. This way you can control which virtual machines are being monitored.
You can control access permissions in the VMware client by assigning the No Access role to the vCenter account for the hosts and virtual machines you want to restrict.