r/vmware

We have a small VMWare setup. Two hosts and half a dozen production vms and a few utility vms.

We also have a DRaaS solution that runs on Zerto. Currently, it requres vCenter to work. I am in conversations with the provider for other solutions.

Broadcom are pushing the pricing this year. Its going to be around 10k. I realize thats not a lot compared to others but on my limited yearly budget, it is.

I am looking for ideas regarding migrating away. I've looked at Proxmox and Hyper-v so far. The kicker is the DR. I am waiting for another call from the provider on that.

Any pointers would be welcome!

I don't want all the automation and cloud and AI crap Broadcom charges for. Not every organization is spinning up and down dozens of systems a day, we're very static and our systems are still for the most part pets not cattle. Give me vCenter, a few ESXi hosts and we run NSX but only for firewall no SDN routing at all. We don't run an edge gateway today for example, just DFW. Our stuff is pretty static we don't need automation and we don't need cloud stuff.

I want what I have today, essentially. I keep seeing in comments all I really need to do is add VMware ops for licensing but I can't seem to find a simple support document around this. Everything I keep reading states I'll need multiple components running in HA running on a dedicated compute cluster. I don't think it's an option for us to run in an unsupported config.

Where can I find official documentation saying what people on social media like Reddit are saying, just deploy a license server and run as-is today.

The new planner (Neat tool!) says I need an ops node, cloud proxy, a license node and at least four management services nodes to get up and running on my simple config. I keep reading about how all that needs it's own compute cluster. I don't want that. I just want vCenter, ESXi and a NSX manager to support DFW.

Hey everyone,

We recently discovered an old ESXi instance that has been running unpatched for quite some time. The host is running ESXi 6.7.0 build 13006603 (basically the GA version with no patches applied), and VMware Skyline Health is flagging it with critical security advisories.

At the moment, we don't plan to migrate to a newer version. We just need to patch this host to fix the critical vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, our Broadcom support contract is inactive, and although we hold a perpetual license — software we already paid for — we are unable to download patches from the official portal.

And honestly, this is one of the most frustrating things about Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. It's incredibly disappointing that they've locked access to security patches for tools you legitimately own.

Keeping infrastructure secure shouldn't require jumping through hoops or paying again for something you've already purchased.

Does anyone have an offline ZIP bundle for ESXi 6.7 (latest cumulative patch) that they could share? Something like ESXi670-202xxxxx.zip.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Edit,
Thank you all for your comments! I found several private repositories with the patches needed to at least temporarily mitigate the vulnerabilities. It's a shame the poor decisions Broadcom/VMware made to push us into a more aggressive business model — forcing customers who already paid for perpetual licenses to jump through hoops just to keep their infrastructure secure.

We have Dell OpenManage Enterprise which allows us to update firmware for our Dell hardware. There is a plugin that is titled "OMVV" which should let is integrate with vCenter 9.

I am curious if anyone has this setup and can verify functionality?

I am faced with a weird scenario. Host has two 10Gbps uplinks. Physical NIC usage in the performance chart shows what seems to be ridiculous numbers; ~55 million Kilobytes per second? Is that even possible? Incidentally SolarWinds monitoring goes red echoing these spikes, reporting sometimes up to 800% utilization on a given vmnic, i.e., % of the 10 Gbps, naturally.

ESXTOP dos not reflect this. ESXTOP show some spikes around the time of the ones in the chart, but no more than 2 to 3 Gbps coming from one or two VMs.

Is this false positives, or what? Can someone please help explain?

I'm writing a script (more reusing what I already found here and in old VMware community) that will move VMs based on tags into resource pools. This also involves creation of new RPs. I now noticed that I can't create a RP in a cluster without DRS (we still have some ROBO licenses). Ok, makes sense somehow. But then I noticed that I _can_ create RPs on single hosts that have the same ROBO license.

Why can't I create RP then in clusters? It could still guarantee resources for VMs running on each individual host without *D*RS feature. It's also not possible with a cluster to create RPs for the individual hosts.

Now I have to argue why we can guarantee resources on DRS-Clusters _and_ single hosts, but not on Non-DRS-Clusters. It's a bit hard to explain...

Hi,

I need clarification regatdin ESXi free version use in production environment. In the realese notes it is mentioning that "it is for non-production use". But in KB article created in 2026-04-02 it is not stating that it needs to be used only in non-production "This is ideal for: Home labs etc.). In limitation section there are also no mentioning about production etc. So the main question - can it be used in production env. and if we will use it so can we get fine from VMware?

We've bought a new compute and storage cluster, migrating the storage for normal VMs is simple, but how would i live storage migrate a Clustered VMs into the otger storage?

Need to replace my Dell Poweredge R740 with a R770 with the below hard drive specs:

RAID Configuration	C0, Diskless Configuration (No RAID, No Controller)
RAID Controller	No Controller
Hard Drives	No Hard Drive

has anybody went for this config on their ESXI host? is that ok?

Basically i was setting up VMware Tools 3.5.0 for Windows 95 RTM-OSR1 i found on Archive, chose a complete setup type after connecting it, and followed the instructions (changed the adapter type to VMware SVGA II installed from active D: drive in progr~15>vmware>vmware~5>drivers>video>win9x).

I could install a "winPre2k" tools file, but it kept giving errors about an "illegal operation". Clicked OK, Closed the change display type window when it showed VMware SVGA II title of the adapter, applied the changes with a restart.

Unfortunately after i visited settings, it displayed:

"Your display adapter is not configured properly. To correct the problem, click OK to start the Hardware Installation Wizard", and "Unable to use legacy SVGA driver" in message log.

And i just took time for Windows to search for a new hardware until it didn't find nothing. I added the VMware SVGA II display adapter once again after scanning for a new hardware but no result. I even reinstalled the drivers. Twice.

Also tried repairing the VMware Tools 3.5.0, removing it, still the same result. I even changed the hardware compatibility to the lowest possible. The specifications of the virtual machine are as following:

VMware Workstation Pro 25H2's Virtual Machine Specifications:

Hardware Compatibility - Workstation 5.x

Memory - 100MB

Processors - 1 (Total cores: 1)

Hard Disk (IDE 0:0) - 10GB

Network Adapter - NAT

Sound Card - Auto Detect

CD/DVD (IDE 1:0) - VMware Tools 3.5.0

VMware Tools - Installed without the VMware SVGA II display adapter applied, and color palette.

About the PC's specifications:

CPU - Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4020 1.10GHz

Graphics Processor - Intel(R) UHD Graphics 600

Hard Disk (C: and D: drive) - WDC PC SN530 SDBPNPZ-256G-1002

One more thing - I ran these VMware Tools from PHD 3.0 Silicon-Power USB Device (HDD disk), and before you ask why would I emulate Windows 95 OSR1 on VMware rather than 86Box, PCem, etc. I'm just archiving Windows ISOs/IMGs for fun and setting up 86box's processor/machine type just to get greeted by a resizable black screen only is kind of a pain in the ass.

I hope I provided enough information for a solution to this problem.

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=a00156316en\_us&docLocale=en\_US

So apparently hpe dropped vendor addons for synergy.

Now I'm stuck with bunch of esxi I can't upgrade via lcm because driver version is newer on the host than on image.

How to manage esxi build upgrades without updated vendor addon?

(Download link in thread).

I found some guides on how to configure with Cisco switches but looking for information on how to configure for Juniper.

I'm using Mellanox ConnectX-6 NICs and the Juniper switch is a QFX5120-48Y

Migrated 15,000+ VMs off VMware at a Fortune 500 company. Took 23 months. Landed on a mix of OpenShift and Hyper-V.

Seeing a lot of posts about people trying to figure out their exit strategy with the Broadcom pricing situation. Happy to answer questions or talk through anyone's specific situation in the comments — no agenda, just been through it and know how painful it is.

I work in the DOD and I need to renew our STS signing cert since it is expiring soon. I've replaced the machine SSL with no issues but that's not the case with STS.

How do I generate a CSR for STS? I know I have to manually create a pem file with the private key and full chain but can't figure out how to generate a csr. Any help is appreciated!

Title says it all, I have an old HP server that I am trying to get back up and running (I made an oopsie and formatted the thing, I'm new) and I've been trying for a couple weeks to get Ubuntu server to do what I want, but it doesn't seem to cooperate.

Any help finding this ISO?

Thanks!

We are trying to add NSX Security Only and we receive the error below.

We have tried a new install of NSX-t and also deploying new DVS and the error persists. If we remove the DVS associated with the error ( dvs-34006 ) a new dvs port appears in the error.

https://preview.redd.it/2oaipat1mn1h1.png?width=1688&format=png&auto=webp&s=ba0495dd664a9c46c84184d8a7a4971fd22a9c2f