You can export a report for the license usage of products for a certain time period. The report is exported in a CSV file that you can later open with third-party applications.

Important: A tamper-detection feature in the License Service protects the license usage information. If the licensing data in the License Service database has been edited, you cannot export a license usage report.

Prerequisites

  • To export license usage reports, you must have the Global.Licenses privilege on the vCenter Server system, where the vSphere Web Client runs.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Web Client, select Administration, and under Licensing select Reports.
  2. Click Export Licensing Usage Report.
    The Export Licensing Usage Report window appears.
  3. Select a preconfigured or a custom time period for the license usage report from the Time period drop-down menu.
  4. Click Generate CSV report.
    The operation takes a few seconds.
  5. Click Save.
  6. Browse to the location where you want to save the file and click Save.

Results

The license usage for products over the selected time period is exported in a CSV file. The CSV file is contained in a .zip file that is saved to the location that you specified.

The exported report contains raw data about the license usage of products over the selected period. The rows of the exported CSV file list the license usage snapshots that the License Service has collected daily over the selected period. You can use third-party tools to open the CSV report and analyze its data.

A license usage snapshot contains data about the assigned licenses, associated products, license expiration date, license units (cost units), capacity, usage, asset ID, and so on. Permanent licenses do not have an expiration date listed. vCloud Suite is licensed on per CPU basis, and so, the license usage for vCloud Suite products is reflected only for ESXi hosts that are assigned licenses from the corresponding vCloud Suite editions.