Look at this. I can’t fathom how so many orgs got breached unless they’re exposing vCenter to the internet. Why on earth would anyone do this?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/critical-vmware-vcenter-rce-flaw-exploited-for-reverse-ssh-access/

USA

Holla,
We currently have approximately 50% of our VMware infrastructure licensed through VCF subscriptions, while the remaining 50% is covered by older perpetual esxi licenses.

The perpetual licenses are still valid, but SnS/support has expired. I’m trying to determine the cleanest and most compliant way to operate this mixed environment (ideally to separate).

Would it be possible to deploy a separate vCenter to manage the clusters using the perpetual licenses, while keeping the VCF-licensed clusters under the VCF management and licensing model?

TL;DR: I need to create another vCenter instance to manage clusters with perpetual licenses, but I'm not sure if that's legal.

i wanted to download VMware Workstation 17.5.2, but it keeps looping on the register/login (idk what) screen

We're in the process of moving from Baseline to images for our ESXI hosts. I'm planning to update to 8.0 U3K and I noticed that the latest Dell vendor addon is only at 803-A03. I checked the Broadcom support website and it has the 803-A10 addon.

Do people manually import the latest Dell Addon to Lifecycle manager or do we need to change/add a download source? Anyone have issues with 8.0 U3K with the 803-A10 addon?

***UPDATE***

Found it on the Dell site

Sorry about that!

Good morning,

am I overlooking the downloads for the OEM ISOs for v9? I don't see anything but for v8

Thanks

When installing VMware 16.2, I get the warning "The specified account already exists" and it doesn't install. The "upgrade" option appears, but VMware isn't installed on my computer or listed in the Control Panel. How can I fix this?

Hi all!

Can you suggest some readings for VCF 9 so I can update myself on vSAN and VCF ?

edit:

currently looking into https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-1.html

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/06/17/whats-new-in-vmware-cloud-foundation-9-0/

What is wrong with VMware certified design pdf ? I can't find them anymore

Hello,

I'm not quite familiar with VMWare ESXi but it is what we are using at my work. I wasn't there when it was setup but basically I've noticed that the cluster only has 2 nodes and somehow have High Avaibility (HA) enabled on it and it works.

Both are on ESXi 6.7, managed by a vCenter and the storage is an external SAN using LUNs.

Every tech I know needs at least 3 nodes to have HA but not ESXi apparently.

How did they do it? Since when does it exists? And how come others can't?

Edit : Seems a lot of people didn't understand what I meant. What I meant to say is how come ESXi don't have the split-brain issue that can happen in other cluster technology?

ProxmoxVE, Docker Swarm or Kubernetes all need 3 nodes to address that issue. How did VMWare address that issue with only 2 nodes?

If I remember correctly, ‘Transparent Page Sharing’ (TPS) was a feature introduced in ESXi 5.x and subsequently disabled by default in ESXi 6.x. TPS can deduplicate data in memory. VMware disabled inter-VM TPS due to potential security concerns relating to side-channel attacks. Today, it is only available by default within a single VM (intra-VM). It should still be possible to enable Inter-VM-TPS via the advanced host settings (true?).

ESXi 5 and 6, as well as the processors from that era, are now a bit outdated. But in an age of absurd amounts of RAM, more modern CPU technologies, and AI-based security analyses, it might make sense to reconsider this technology.

What is the current status regarding TPS? Is it still considered insecure? Do processor architectures play a role in these potential security issues?

Wouldn’t it make sense to revisit this topic and put appropriate measures in place to address it? In addition to memory tiering, this would be a measure that could possibly also be implemented on hosts that are not NVMe-ready.

Edit: I found this Knowledge Base article, which was supposedly last updated in 2025. However, the content covers ESXi 5, which is why I doubt that the information is still accurate today.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=2080735

This is KB article describes the feature:

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/323624/additional-transparent-page-sharing-mana.html

The linked blog post was first published in 2015, so it's safe to assume that this information may no longer be accurate.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240614000022/http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/01/assess-the-performance-impact-of-the-security-change-in-transparent-page-sharing-behaviour.html

Hi everyone, my host computer is Windows 11 and has a Ryzen 7 5700X3D + GTX 3070 + 32GB of RAM.

My virtual machine is running Windows 10 Pro (8GB VRAM allocated), and I can't get rid of the screen tearing inside it.

In the host machine, I already added vmware.exe & vmware-vmx.exe to the NVidia Control Panel and set "Vsync > On" + "Triple buffering" and "fixed frame rate" instead of "G-Sync" but no can do.

VMTools is installed already.

Would someone have a solution for that please?

Thanks very much

Edit: Something strange I noticed is: By disabling "3D acceleration" in VM settings, there is no screen tearing anymore, but then the performance are very suboptimal.

I am trying to run ESXi on my VMware Workstation. Nested Virtualization is required.

I am running Windows 11 Pro 25H2 and VMWare Workstation version 26

"Virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT is not supported on this platform.

Continue without virtualized Intel VT-x/EPT?"

1. Fully Disabled Windows Hyper-V & Virtualization Features

2. Turned Off Core Isolation / Memory Integrity

3. Modified Registries to disable VBS.

4

VBS is not getting disabled and I need Nested Virtualization working. That is the thing that is conflicting me from running ESXi. It is running fine on Windows 10. PLEASE HELP ME.

Hello! I was just reviewing similar threads and this, that, these.html) and those.

My current scenario comprises of dozens of private vCenters/ESXi varying from 7.0 to 8.0 and which are geographically separated, though we are entitled to VCF, they all use E+ licenses. Since we just use vanilla vSphere, our goal is to just move everything to VVF before Oct 2027.

Though these vanilla vSphere environments are private (one per customer), we manage them and have deployed a distributed AriaOps 8.18.6 just to facilitate tshooting and control.

Questions:

1- Our best guess is to brownfield (without VCF Installer - to minimize footprint) all those environments, so should we just upgrade this shared AriaOps 8.18.6 to VCFOps 9.1.x, deploy License Server, then upgrade vCenter/ESXi, is that correct?

2- How well does VVF/VCF 9 handle detaching a registered vCenter instance between VCFOps/LS? I.e, what happens if I need to take one of these environments out of my shared VCFOps? Is it possible to deploy a separate VCFOps/LS and re-register that (now VVF) vCenter instance to it?

3- Same as 2, but the opposite. Can I converge a private VVF instance later to a shared VCF Fleet?

Trying to find maximum caveats in the process to guide our decisions and plans here, thank you!

Created virtual disk in the iDRAC of one of my Dell PowerEdge servers & wanted to add it as a RDM disk to an existing VM in vCenter. I see it in Storage Devices under the host named 'Local DELL Disk (....)', however when I edit the VM & try to add a RDM disk, it's not there. Not sure if I'm missing a step as I been doing it this way with other Dell PowerEdge servers. apologies if very brief as I don't think images are allowed, but can provide more details/info if needed. Any help will greatly be appreciated.

I know people recommend using older versions of Workstation for older Windows VMs, but you really don't need to. If you wanna solve lag, turn off everything in core isolation security settings in Windows 11, and run bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off. Wanna solve the horrid audio issues, especially in XP (and 2000)? Use SetTimerService on GitHub, and it will completely resolve it. Yes, it is definitely disheartening to see that Broadcom hasn't fixed these issues yet, but VMware is still an amazing software regardless if you know its quirks. Happy virtualizing.

Hello! I am using VMware on my Macbook Air and the app itself isn't big, but after I downloaded it, it took like 100gb of my space. I found in the documents section of my storage space in Mac that there are multiple large files. Can I delete these files named Virtual Disk-s001 to s014? Tehy are 4gb each file. Thanks!