In this post i will go over the Usage Report for vRealize Cloud Licenses. I will cover the online method which does the reporting automatically as well as the offline method that requires us to upload the usage manually. The documentation for the Usage Report can be found here. The vRealize Cloud Universal service description EULA and requirements can be found here.

As described the EULA our responsibilities include:

• Deploy the latest version of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager in your on-premiseenvironment, and establish a connection between vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager and your VMware customer account.
• Use vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to apply the vRealize Cloud Universal license key to on-premise components of the Service Offering and activate these components.
• Connect vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager to enable usage reporting to VMware. If the on-premise environment is offline and unable to connect to vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager, you are responsible for periodically exporting a license report from vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager and uploading the report to vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager, but no less than once per VMware fiscal quarter.

We will be spending most of our time in vRealize® Suite Lifecycle Manager. Log in and go to the locker page either from the welcome screen

Or the menu on the top right:

Once in locker we can go to Licenses and search for our subscription license. The license will show up as vRealizeFlex under the license type

If there are no licenses showing up you probably don’t have the my VMware account logged on. You can follow the instructions in my other post here to add the my VMware account.

Now if we click on the 3 dots to right we get to see a menu for things like Usage report, view usage and so on

The online sync option is very straight forward. All we need to do is click on Connect License and provide an API token.

The API token generation instructions can be found in the official documentation here. The next step is to match the license key with a subscription and then setup the reporting frequency. Unfortunately i dont have an cloud subscription that i have permissions to match my key with.

The next option is the offline usage report. Keep in mind that the report will need to be updated multiple times a year as required by the EULA. To create the report we can go to Usage Report in the dropdown menu

Select vRealize Cloud Subscription Manager Billing

Click on download. Once the download is completed you can upload the file in the subscription manager.

I would try the restore options first. You can find instructions for the restore menu here

If the recovery menu doesn’t work put the Mac mini in DFU mode by following the instructions I have here

One the device is in DFU open Apple Configurator 2 (Mac Only sorry Windows folks). Make sure you are at least at version Version 2.13.2

Connect the USB-C cable to the Mac and the Mac mini to the port closest to the ethernet port

If you are presented with the DFU screen below in Apple Configurator 2 the procedure was done correctly

Right click -> Advanced -> Revive device

This will download the operating system and perform a reinstall of the OS preserving the user data

If you would like to erase everything pick the restore option

Apple Configurator 2 will go through downloading the firmware and perform a restore of the system

1. Disconnect the power cord from the Mac Mini.
2. Plug USB-C/Thunderbolt cable into the USB-C port next to the ethernet port.
3. Plug the other end into the Host Mac.
4. While holding down the power button, connect the Mac Mini to power and continue to hold the power button for about 3-5 seconds
5. You should now see the DFU logo on the Host Mac.

I recently purchased one of the newer Mac mini devices with the new M1 chipset. Unfortunately I went with the lower edition that had 256 GB and I wanted to send it back to purchase the bigger 512 GB edition, but I wanted to clean my installation.

In order to to boot in the recovery mode to reinstall the os I had to perform the following steps:

1. Make sure the Mac mini is off, if its not off just shut it off
2. Hold the power button until the options appear, it might seem like a long time but keep holding it. It took about 15 seconds for me.
3. A menu should appear that shows the hard drive and Options. Select options and continue
4. You will see the apple logo and then a new menu should appear with additional options. It would look like this:

5. If you want to perform a clean install go to Disk Utility first and erase the current partitions, after that step is complete come back to the options screen and Select Reinstall macOS Big Sur and click on continue