How to exclude ESXi host from vROps licensing

Excluding a ESXi host form vROps licensing and thus preventing it from being monitored is not a good idea in general. However, there are some use cases where you would like to exclude ESXi host from vROps monitoring. One case I came across recently is one where a customer used a migration host to move VM’s from one environment to another. The vROps license was overused and an alert was triggered in vROps. To prevent this from happening again, I needed to exclude the ESXi host from vROps licensing. Here is a quick how-to.

Exclude ESXi host from vROps licensing

1. Open a web browser and navigate to your vROps user interface.
2. Login with the administrator account.
3. From the Home page go to Administration -> Licensing.
4. Select the Licensing Groups tab, highlight the Product Licensing group and click the edit button.
5. Make sure the proper license key is selected and click Next.
6. First, minimize the Define membership criteria and the Object to always include.
7. Next, from the Filtered Objects drop-down menu, select vSphere Hosts and Clusters.
8. Expand the vSphere World, vCenter Adapter, cluster, and select an ESXi host you want to exclude from the vROps licensing. Click Next.
9. Preview the changes and click Finish.

All done! The selected ESXi host is now excluded from vROps licensing and the license overuse alarm should not be triggered anymore. 🙂

Cheers!

– Marek.Z