Insufficient licensable resources available to create Service Engine – NSX Advanced Load Balancer

4 January 2023 Off By arnaud

Problem

While playing around with NSX-T Advanced Load Balancer, I noticed the following alarm: Insufficient licensable resources available to create Service Engine. But how is it getting triggered and most importantly how to solve it?

The description is very straightforward: you don’t have enough licenses to spin up more Service Engines. You can check your licence count in the UI underneath Administration -> Settings -> Licensing.

But what in the case that you surely should have some license free? Did you maybe tried to deploy Service Engines which failed? If yes, you might have a license reservation issue. One of the first steps during the deployment of new Service Engines is making a license reservation. If the SE deployment fails, this reservation remains for approx. 1 hour.

Solution

So the first solution could be to remove the failed SEs and wait for at least 1 hour. After that time the reservation should be cleared automatically. But if you are getting this issue, you are probably short on licenses. You don’t want to wait 1 hour while troubleshooting the deployment.

To get this reservation cleared right await execute the following API call.

https://<CONTROLLER>/api/licensing/ledger/clear/reservation

The easiest way to execute this, is by copy-pasting this URL in your browser. Just be sure you are already logged in onto the controller UI. You should get a success response.