Resetting the VMware ESXi trial period

Sometimes I am asked to build a vSphere environment on a trial license from VMware. By default this is 60 days. However after building the environment, updating and testing the trial period will have dropped a number of days. The customer rightly pointed out that this has reduced their trail of the product.

You can use this command at the ESXi shell to reset the trail period back to 60 days.

rm -r /etc/vmware/license.cfg
cp /etc/vmware/.#license.cfg /etc/vmware/license.cfg
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart