Disclaimer: This post is only intended for MSP & Hyperscalers only. Also below content is based on my learnings and I encourage reader of this post to cross verify things with VMware before executing/implementing anything. 

HCX is one of the key component in SDDC As a Service offering by hyperscalers (Google, Azure, CloudSimple, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba etc). HCX is consumed as SaaS offering in VMware SDDC’s on top of hyperscalers cloud. Automated deployment and configuration of HCX (cloud) is hyperscalers responsibility and this process becomes a bit complex when it comes to life-cycle management of HCX. 

One of the challenges with HCX is Activation key management. An activation key can have many states including:

1: Available: This is state of a freshly generated Activation key by a MSP. Keys that are in available state can be used to activate HCX appliances (Cloud/Connector).

MSP/Hyperscalers can generate activation keys (via API) to activate Tenant HCX-Cloud appliance. Also corresponding hcx-connector can be distributed to tenant to be used in on-prem HCX deployment.

API: POST https://{{hcx_msp_host}}/msp/api/subscriptions/<SID>?action=generateActivationKeys

2: Consumed: This is the state of key when it has been used to activate HCX appliance (cloud/connector).

3: Deactivated: This is the state of key when it is deactivated from backend.

The HCX systems which were activated using this license is no longer functional and you can’t use hybridity features. MSP/Hyperscalers can mark a key for deactivation as part of tenant decommissioning.

Note: Activation keys which are in deactivated state, can’t be deleted, but it can be reactivated back.

API: POST: https://{{hcx_msp_host}}/msp/api/subscriptions/<SID>?action=deactivateAppliance

4: Deleted: A key can go into deleted state only if it was never consumed. Only those keys which are in available state, can be marked for deletion. 

API: POST https://{{hcx_msp_host}}/msp/api/subscriptions/<SID>?action=deleteActivationKey

Can I upgrade an Activation key from HCX-Advance to HCX-Enterprise?

MSP/Hyperscalers can certainly do this via MSP API. If a MSP/hyperscalers have those HCX offer (which generates HCX-Enterprise keys) tied to their Account, they can change offer of a particular subscription to higher version, which will convert all keys under that subscription from HCX-Advance to HCX-Enterprise.

Can I downgrade an Activation key from HCX-Enterprise to HCX-Advance?

Currently this functionality is not available via MSP API and a MSP/Hyperscaler has to raise Service Request to VMware to do this from backend. 

Can I deactivate all keys listed under a particular subscription at once?

This can be done by deleting a subscription, but delete subscription API is not exposed to MSP’s. This operation can be performed only by VMware.  This safety net is introduced to avoid any catastrophic results, as deleting a subscription would deactivate all the keys tagged to it. 

And that’s it for this post.  

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