Does Prime Collaboration Deployment work with ESXi eval license?

[jeff.msweet]

Does Prime Collaboration Deployment work with ESXi eval license? 

Per the 11.5.2 PCD admin guide...

The following are compatible with Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment:

• Cisco UC Virtualization Foundation (appears as "Foundation Edition" in vSphere Client)
• Cisco UC Virtualization Hypervisor Plus 6.0 or higher
• VMware vSphere Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, or Enterprise Plus Edition
• Evaluation mode license (for example, for lab deployments and not production use)

The following are not compatible with Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployment:

• Cisco UC Virtualization Hypervisor (appears as "Hypervisor Edition" in vSphere Client)
• VMware vSphere Hypervisor Edition

The reason I'm asking is I cannot add my ESXi cluster in PCD.  

Thanks

[Jaime Valencia]

Yes, the caveat is that you do not get Cisco support if you use the eval license.

You can only ask support from Cisco if you use a paid license.

[jeff.msweet]

Thanks Jaime

At least that clears up the lic part.

My PCD is 11.5.2.10000-4, ESXi 6.0 

When I go to add the ESXi cluster I get the below error.  

Failed to mount Cisco Prime Collaboration Deployments export as NFS store to the ESXi Host. Please look at the exception details in PCD logs and check the ESXi logs for further details of the exceptions reported on PCD.

Is there any other requirements that need to be done on the ESXi host besides the eval lic and logging in as the root user?

[Jaime Valencia]

There are a few things that can cause that

Network problems

Having reached the maximum amount of NFS stores allowed

Having lockdown mode enabled on the server

[dbooth]

Hi,

I have this problem too.  The ESXi host is running an eval license, the PCD and ESXi host can ping each other, they are in the same subnet with no firewall in between, there are no other NFS stores configured and it is not in lockdown mode (the option is greyed out on console).  Can anybody advise how else to resolve this issue?

Thanks.

[Sam V. Xavier]

Hi,

I am facing the same issue. As an alternative we moved our PCD VM on VLAN based VM rather than VXLAN and that fixed the issue. This brings to the question, does PCD support VXLAN?

Regards,

Sam

[Jaime Valencia]

Haven't heard of anyone using VXLAN before with PCD, as per your testing, chances are, it's not supported.

[dbooth]

Just for info, the PCD was configured with the customer's DNS servers which were unreachable during pre-config stage and this stopped it adding the ESXi cluster.  Removing DNS servers fixed the issue.

[ray.maslanka]

One other cause I haven't seen mentioned is overly complex passwords on the ESXi root user account will raise the same error.

ESXi 6 now enforces complex passwords by default.  You can use the security string found in ESXi 5 temporarily to simplify passwords while using PCD and set them back when you're done if need be.