A common question I receive from customers is why they don’t see a VMware Cloud Foundation license in the MyVMware portal. What appears instead is licenses for each individual product that make up the VCF edition you purchased. Which is typically:

• vSphere & vCenter
• vSAN
• NSX
• SDDC Manager
• vRealize Operations, Automation, and Log Insight
• Horizon (optional)
• Enterprise PKS (optional)

So how do you consume these licenses? Assuming you have the hardware in place and you’re ready to bring up VCF, the first step is to deploy Cloud Builder and download/complete the VCF deployment parameters worksheet. In the deployment parameter worksheet, you’ll enter license keys for the following components:

• vSphere & vCenter
• vSAN
• NSX
• vRealize Log Insight

The license keys should match with the version of VCF that you’re deploying. During bring-up, the license key audit only validates the format of the key, not the accuracy. See the Bill of Materials (BOM) in the VMware Cloud Foundation Release Notes for the specific product versions supported in each release.

With the management workload domain deployed, you’ll (optionally) enter the license keys for:

• vRealize Automation; you can also use a vRealize Suite or vCloud Suite license key
• vRealize Operations; you can also use a vRealize Suite or vCloud Suite license key
• vRealize Log Insight
• NSX-T
• Horizon

To get started, select Licensing from the left navbar:

Which brings up the existing licenses that have been added (in the example below, I have a fully deployed SDDC):

Click the + LICENSE KEY and add each product key:

Now that licenses are added, you can create a new workload domain, add a host to a cluster, or add a cluster to a workload domain.