ESXi 5.5 - extend or workaround evaluation license?

Hello VMware friends!

Since VMware sacked the beloved VMTN subscription (probably by some fucking douche in a suit) life for admins running VMware ESXi in labs and development is now a pain in the ass.

I want to discuss the easiest way to extend the life span in a VMware lab environment without re-installing ESXi hosts every time. Calling VMware and ask for a new license is not one of them. Trust me. Re-installing the host with scripts that configure all settings is too much of a pain as well. Obviously, I cannot buy licenses.

What I can see, resetting the eval key is the best way. There are a few guides on that, but that seems to be applicable to older versions.

So, my two lab ESXi 5.5 hosts are connected to a licensed vCenter. Previously they were running on eval that have now expired.

I have tried this, does not work on ESXi 5.5

• At the console; login

• Bepannah rahul jain song download. Enable Local Tech Support Mode

• Press Alt-F1 to get to the login prompt

• Login as root

• cd /etc/vmware

• rm-r vmware.lic

• rm-r license.cfg

• services.sh -restart (also tried reboot)

• If you have this ESXi host in a cluster, remove it and then add it again using a Evaluation Mode

Also, creating a new vmware.lic containing serial 00000-00000-00000-00000-00000 (that serial is used by 5.5 in eval mode) does not work.

Evaluation mode is not available when adding the host back to the vCenter Server.

So, anyone succeeded with this on ESXi 5.5? Or do you have another solution?

Please share!