The reason for this is that this additional information is stored in a property called properties which be any key/value pair and depending on the license, you will see a list of different values. You will notice, there are no properties for expiration date or the features that is enabled for each of these licenses. To view all license in the system, there is a property called licenses which contains detailed information about each license such as the name, license key, unit cost, used, etc. To access anything related to licensing in the vSphere API, there is something called the LicenseManager object which provides methods to add/remove licenses from vCenter Server or an ESXi host as well as various properties about the licenses currently registered. I also wanted to provide some additional details on where to look for the expiration details as well as other information pertaining to licenses in vSphere.

I provided a quick sample script to the user but thought I might as well clean it up a bit and share it with the rest of the VMware community. Even though there are vCenter alarms that monitor license usage and compliance, it still makes sense that users may still want to be proactively monitoring their license keys for expiration and ensuring they are renewed in a timely manner. Last week I received a question about retrieving the expiration date for vSphere licenses in vCenter Server which can be seen in both the vSphere Web Client and vSphere C# Client under the Licensing section.

Find vsphere license key