Recently, I was tasked with migrating our MSE licenses from one MSE to the other as part of converting the MSEs to a HA pair. We have several licenses and Cisco reissued the licenses so they could be applied to the migration target. That was the easy part.
As I was adding the licenses to the new MSE the services stopped responding and I was unable to get them running again. I tried stopping/starting the services, restarting the services, and rebooting the server with no luck. For most people this wouldn't be a big deal. In fact, I have run across some posts on the Cisco support forums from people with the same issue. The typical fix was to wipe out the server and start over. Unfortunately for me, this wasn't an option if it could be avoided. Our MSEs run the Aeroscout engine which is used to track, among other things, temperature sensors on freezers full of expensive pharmaceuticals.
I contacted Cisco and once I was put in touch with a TAC engineer we went through several troubleshooting steps including uninstalling/reinstalling the MSE software. In order to get everything working again we had to uninstall the MSE software and delete the database then reinstall everything. Once that was done the Aeroscout engine was put back into place and everything was brought back online.
Once everything was working again I asked the TAC engineer for an explanation. I wanted to know why this happened. Naturally, she told me that without the logs she had me delete during the troubleshooting process she wouldn't be able to provide me with an explanation. I got the same thing from the advanced engineer I contacted next.
Having failed at getting an explanation, I asked if TAC at least had a recommendation on adding the licenses to prevent this from happening again. TAC recommends that, if as in our case, all licenses be combined into a single license (we had six difference licenses) and use the Cisco Prime interface to add the licenses rather than copying them directly into the licenses folder on the MSE.
I don't know if this will help anyone else. I doubt most people need to maintain their MSE's uptime like we do. This will most likely apply to other medical institutions more than anywhere else. Still I figured it would be worth mentioning if it helps others avoid the same frustration.
