No entitlements, licenses etc

[Debra Parent]

I have nothing in my dashboard. No entitlements, no licenses, etc. and the support page errors out.

[NickDaGeekUK]

did you have an active support contract at the time of migration and if so have you requested your Site ID yet?

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IT Manager. That person just about managing to keep the IT going with no budget or staff despite the effects of Senior Management and End Users.

IT Worker. A biological system for turning caffeine into code.
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[Debra Parent]

Yes I had a couple of active support contracts at the time of migration. I have an open ticket for my site ID but have heard nothing back.

Thank You
Debra Parent, MBA
IT, Network Administrator
U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Oklahoma
918-684-7985

[NickDaGeekUK]

Site ID is taking ages to be allocated and communicated, seeing lots of posts regarding this all over the forums. Can you get to the support ticket system? if you can try raising another support ticket you might get a quicker response. I tried build my profile and following the link to request the Site ID more than once and got several ticket numbers and no response. Opened a support ticket manually and got a response within a day or two.

------------------------------
IT Manager. That person just about managing to keep the IT going with no budget or staff despite the effects of Senior Management and End Users.

IT Worker. A biological system for turning caffeine into code.
------------------------------

[Debra Parent]

Yes I opened one manually. I will try another one, thank you.

Thank You
Debra Parent, MBA
IT, Network Administrator
U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Oklahoma
918-684-7985

[PaulB2]

I had the same issue and to resolve I called in on the support number and the agent had to add my site IDs.

-pb

[psiess]

Lucky you.  I  called today and was told "you just have to wait".

[psiess]

I feel your pain.  I have 4 support contracts and cannot access any of them. 

I said it on another post and I'll repeat it here:  BROADCOM...if you're listening (but I doubt you are): open the VMware portal back up and allow customers to download their entitlements, since you were unsuccessful at transferring them.

[alantz]

I'm in Entitlement limbo as well. Just crossing my fingers I don't need support or downloads until this gets all straightened out. 

[NickDaGeekUK]

Seems to be a common problem and support is broken with a failed OKTA authentication too.

Kind Regards,

Nick

[ocheeslice]

I ended up calling the support number to get set up with my site number. After a couple of days in the pending mode, I opened a case about not being able to join/split/upgrade license files and complained that nothing was showing in my entitlements. They managed to get my site ID from pending to approved and everything works now including the support page for cases. So my advice would be not to wait for your site ID to move from pending to approved as there is something wrong with their process. Open a case that you can't do something {get to My Cases, change license keys, etc.} and when they reply with a solution make sure to complain about the site ID not being approved so their solution isn't an option at this point and they will get it fixed for you. 

[phone] -- Call if you need help with getting a site ID and requesting access

 <https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/contact-support> - Click Open new case [blue button] on right side of screen under Customer Case Management -> open a case saying you can't do something and when they reply complain that your entitlements are not there so you still can't do the solution they suggest. 

[NickDaGeekUK]

As a legacy Perpetual Licence holder, I had no support contract, you can't renew or buy it for perpetual anymore, so I didn't automatically migrate.

I am still dealing with support who are desperately trying to close the case. They are saying explicitly, you have an account we can see you have valid licences but no contract that means you do not get a Site ID which means no download entitlements.

They don't care if you have a valid perpetual licence, the Broadcom answer is go buy a new subscription to a new product. I understand you can decide to stop selling new perpetual licences, that is your legal right. To retrospectively deny access to download installers and patches for customers with existing perpetual licences is a legal grey area to me.

The whole ethos of the Broadcom acquisition seems to be merciless profit squeezing. The cancellation of the freeware version of ESXi was small minded and petty. It just hit tech and home lab users: i.e. small business tech departments (running test not production environments), students learning the system and home enthusiasts. If you had a small business production environment the way to go was legal using the cheap VMWare essentials package on a perpetual licence. If you were short on budget that year you just dropped the support contract and picked it up again when you had the money to upgrade. Not the best business model I agree but it gained them thousands of SME customers. Killing perpetual on acquisition was just squeezing more money out of the small businesses at a time they could least afford it.

It is long overdue for the legislatures to investigate this acquisition, which like so many others, has not been in the public interest.

Broadcom the answer is simple: Put the whole of your legacy products archive outside your paywall. If you are not supporting it fine, that is your right. Just do the honourable thing and allow existing users with valid licence keys to get on with doing their own thing. If hosting costs are an issue (billion-dollar profits so not really an argument) there are public mirrors out there.

If Broadcom don't sell it, or support it, anymore what exactly are you gaining by holding onto it?

If you annoy enough people they will not upgrade, they will vote with their feet and leave. There are other suppliers out there and Open Source Proxmox is now supported by Veeam by end of year. Writing is on the wall, I think. What does everyone else think?

Kind Regards,

Nick

[Diane Parella]

We downloaded all of our license keys in advance of the start of the migration, so hopefully that will be enough for my IT guys to do what they need to do.  But some of our entitlements still haven't made it into the Broadcom portal.  And it took us a while to get the right folks the admin access we needed.  Although I'm a full admin on our site IDs, I'm still not able to add new users to access any of the folders.  And it's crazy complicated to get to the folder structure (never thought I'd miss the old VMWare portal so much!!!)

I've opened multiple tickets.  Some have just sat unaddressed for days.  For the tickets requesting full admin access to all of our site IDs I had to also share the ticket numbers with my sales rep and his boss - I'm not sure if they actually helped to escalate them but I did finally get the admin access - at least it says I have that access - but still can't add new users.  So maybe try to share your case numbers with your VMWare sales team and ask them to escalate for you?