Activating Expired OM 2012 to RTM

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As we all know, Operations Manager 2012 requires activation through entering the well-known powershell command “set-scomlicense”. This is documented in https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2699998 

Even though the license isn’t entered, OM12 will let you work 180 days and at the end SDK service will not authorize the connections from ANY console including powershell – hey wait! how am I supposed to run the powershell command then??? – wait till the end of the post Smile 

Before diving into the details please check your license status using “Get-SCOMManagementGroup” and if your MG is not expired please set the license ASAP not to cause an operations outage.

The exception details can be found in Operations Manager Event Log , Event id 26319 (a generic authorization event);

Exception message: You have exceeded the evaluation period of this product. Please upgrade to the retail version to continue using the product. For information on purchasing the retail version of this product, go to https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=74446 .
Full Exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: You have exceeded the evaluation period of this product. Please upgrade to the retail version to continue using the product. For information on purchasing the retail version of this product, go to https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=74446

With Operations Manager 2012 Update Rollup 2 license can be entered after the period expired but if only you can connect to SDK right?? (Actually No)

If you Install UR2 and try to open SCOM PowerShell console (Operations Manager Shell) you will receive the same exception because the console will try to connect to SDK service. However the Set-SCOMLicense cmdlet does not require SDK connection and does its job on the Management Server side with UR2.

The easier solution (Solution 1) is based on bypassing the SDKconnection requirement by just loading the OM module but not connecting to SDK, the second option (Solution 2) is a Disaster Recovery of an MS (actually all MSs)

Solution 1;

The high-level steps of Activating the expired OM12;

  1. Update to UR2 For details on UR2 please check Kevin’s Blog https://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2012/07/31/opsmgr-2012-update-rollup-2-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx
  2. On the updated MS open a Windows PowerShell Console (with run as Admin of course)
  3. Load OperationsManager Module
    • import-module OperationsManager
  4. set the license without connecting to SDK
    • Set-SCOMLicense -ProductId "yourlicensekey“
  5. Restart SDK Service
  6. Please wait a couple minutes if you get a timeout, it might take sometime for SDK to initialize

Solution 2;

In case the above steps don’t work (I hope it won’t be required) the second option is to run a disaster recovery for the management servers for details https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh531578.aspx.

The high-level steps of MS Recovery are as follows – This has to be applied on all Management Servers;

  1. Uninstall the MS role
  2. Reinstall the MS using the “to recover a Management Server” section in above technet article.
  3. Reenter all RunAs Accounts (all of them) using the steps “to Reconfigure the RunAs Accounts” and “To Remove SQL server Authentication” sections of the same article
  4. Once you can connect to SDK run Set-SCOMLicense

I hope this explains and helps.

References;

  1. Disaster Recovery in System Center 2012 - Operations Manager - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh531578.aspx
  2. Kevin’s UR2 Experience - https://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2012/07/31/opsmgr-2012-update-rollup-2-ships-and-my-experience-installing-it.aspx
  3. How to add a product key to an eval version of System Center 2012 Operations Manager - https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2699998 (please note this valid before the expiration)