Extracting ESXi Licence

[beersykins]

Hello,

 

I need to recover the license key on an ESXi host that nobody knows the password to.  Conveniently, the guy who documented the keys no longer works here (this company is clearly, super awesome).

 

Is there any way to mount the vmkcore into Linux to retrieve that, or something similar?

[leadeater]

9 minutes ago, beersykins said:

Hello,

 

I need to recover the license key on an ESXi host that nobody knows the password to.  Conveniently, the guy who documented the keys no longer works here (this company is clearly, super awesome).

 

Is there any way to mount the vmkcore into Linux to retrieve that, or something similar?

What version of ESXi? Extreme long shot but if its' 4.x or less you can reset the root password, if not well, RIP.

 

Can you not just log a support case with VMware to get access to the license portal for the company, then you can view the license key there.

[beersykins]

5.5, I guess VMware only suggests a re-installation but I found that's not quite accurate.

 

I was able to grab it mounting on a live debian system, a few of the partitions for ESXi are FAT16, config items such as passwd/shadow and the configuration pieces are stored under state.tgz.

 

Cleared the password field out of shadow and was able to log in after re-tarring the archive and rebooting into esxi, but also the /etc/vmware/vmware.lic provides the license key from the livecd side, so great success

 

Thanks for the quick reply.