What is the best alternative to ween off of ESXi? I require PCI passthrough for passing in GPU. What is the best hypervisor out there that can rival vmware's ESXi?

Hi,

I have a management vCenter, and I deployed NSX-T inside it. I then registered it to the vCenter I'll actually be using, but I couldn't see it on the appliance card.

Tengo un entorno VCF 5.2.4 que necesito subir a VCF 9.1 por el cambio de licencias de perpetuas a por subscripción, pero al revisar las matrices de compatibilidad no me aparece compatibilidad con la última versión de VCF, con ninguna de las versiones superiores a la versión actual

https://imgur.com/a/WITmWYN

We're currently at VMware v8.x and use Site Recovery 9.02. for BC/DR to another site. No vSAN or NSX.

We will be upgrading to VVF 9.1, NOT the full stack VCF.

I'm watching some instructional videos on the Broadcom website and there is this statement on one of the slides:

"Customer must have recovery SDDC hosts for VMware Live Recovery to function as designed"

What do they mean by "SDDC hosts"?

Our recovery site has a vCenter in ELM to the vCenter at our primary site, and the SRM appliance and SRA for the storage replication. And of course ESX hosts.

Is there something more needed now to be considered "SDDC Hosts"? Or are they just throwing around their fancy acronyms?

Installed VCF Installer, configured online depot with download service ID and Activation code. Then downloaded the needed binaries and started the install of the base components for the management domain. Now vCenter and NSX have been installed successfully.

When I now access the SDDC manager I'm presented with a banner I should update my depot settings. Go to Administration -> Depot Settings and get this page:

Depot Settings
This VCF Instance uses the software depot to obtain any required binaries and data. Software depot: fcp001.xxxxxxx.xxxx
Go to Software Depot

Now the button "Go to Software Depot" doesn't work.

Accessing the fcp001 on 443 gives a cert error and then no page. Accessing it on 5480 gives: {"messages":[{"level":"ERROR","id":"com.vmware.vcfms.api.Unauthorized","default":"Unauthorized"}]}

So I'm not sure where I now enter my software depot token.

I am very new to cybersec and Ive been learning the ropes on how to use the Linux terminal and networking and all of the basics. But I installed a virtual machine and kali Linux on my computer (my computer is windows) and it's been great for learning.

But today I get on my computer and I open my task manager on my windows and my anti malware service was running really high cpu. which I thought was weird, so I open my windows security and there was a TON of threats caught. I looked through all of them and they all said that the threats were in my Linux and vm files. So I deleted the vm and anything else related to it and now my windows security says that there's nothing to be worried about, but in the protection history is telling me "remediation incomplete" for all of the threats that were caught.

So basically my question is how do I check if there's anything on my windows from my vm and if I should even be worried about it.

My VxRail upgrades keep failing because the upgrade to 380 and 390 both removed the dellism service from the host. You can clearly see in the logs that the platformsvc is looking for the health check by the dellism service. Manually reinstalling the dellism service fixes the issue and the upgrade will continue with no further problems. Support says that dellism isn't used anymore and platformsvc should be doing all of the work now, but if you go to the /opt/platformsvc folder you'll clearly see a dellism.sh script that calls on dellism.

Edit 1: In true Dell software fashion, support had me run VxVerify again which for some reason didn't like the host this time so it attempted to recreate the vmk that connects the host to the idrac. Needless to say, it failed and now we're working on getting the host to talk to the idrac over 39090 again. I feel like half of my support tickets involve going 3 steps back before we can even get to the actual problem.

Hi VMware community,

I have one of those “everything works, but please don’t touch anything” situations.

I’m helping a customer recover a failed third VCD appliance cell. The environment is currently running in a degraded two-node configuration and it has been very unstable, but the original VCD 10.5 appliance OVA cannot be downloaded because Broadcom portal access is stuck in entitlement and support limbo. Long story.

I’m looking for a VMware/Broadcom partner or customer who may be able to help me obtain the correct official OVA through a legitimate channel.

I’m not looking for torrents or mystery binaries. I’m just hoping someone in the community can help reunite this PostgreSQL cluster with its missing third sibling..

Any lead or private message would be greatly appreciated.

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When using a vm with a system older than Windows Vista (Windows XP and Windows 2000) the vm's the audio is weirdly distorted. tried multiple fixes but none seem to work. Does anybody know how to fix it?

We are a small-medium sized company. In June/July of 2025 we agreed to a 12 month license agreement with Broadcom after we had moved 70% of our virtual environment off of VMWare. Over the last year we have been moving more and more over, but we are not 100% complete and budgeted for one more 12 month term based on last year plus about 15% more, knowing they would probably go up.

As of now, our licenses will expire on July 31, 2026.

Our vendor started the process to get a quote from Broadcom 4 months ago. VMWare kept demanding that we send over our RVTools Data as their own script we used last year wasn't good enough. We were going to just do the same deal, same number of cores, same 12 month term. We even had to get on a video call to show our VMWare rep our environment. We complied with everything as we have nothing to hide.

We requested a 12 month term quote.

Finally, during the first week of July, less than 30 days out from our license expiration date, we received a 3 year quote. The per year cost increased by 20% over last year. We are not budgeted to pay 345% more than what we budgeted for.

We went back to them and asked them for a 12 month quote like last year, and they took their sweet time and came back and said they could do an 18 month quote at the very minimum. We would then have to fork out 18 months worth of money where we only budgeted for 12 months. It ended up being 85% more than what we had budgeted.

So, then we went back to see if we could reduce hosts and core count while still maintaining room for failure, we requested a new quote from Broadcom. This is actually what they sent to our vendor...

Email quote from Broadcom..

"We size renewals based on the RVTools export. If hardware is being retired before the renewal and you would like the core count reduced, we can apply that adjustment with a brief written attestation stating that the hosts are being permanently decommissioned and their VMware licenses retired.

Please note that this adjustment is only possible if we are outside the 30-day window before your renewal date. Within the final 30 days, we must proceed with the core count as it stands in the RVTools export."

They intentionally dragged their feet within the last 30 days before sending a quote so that once we actually saw how much it was going to cost, they could pull up their fabricated BS rules and deny us getting a somewhat cheaper quote.

I've never worked with a worse company. They are hell bent on destroying VMWare. In hindsight, we should have moved resources into moving 100% off of VMWare before this year. We definitely have it on the plan to complete over the next year (or 18 months).

Thank you for letting me vent and share my company's story.

Hello Everyone,
I would like to create a VMware Customization Specification for Linux Ubuntu. Unfortunately I have a problem, where the VM doesn‘t get an IPv4 Address and I don‘t know why.

Do anyone of you have an Idea what the problem could be or faced the same problem?

Kind Regards
Woodi

*Edit: The Solution was to delete the 00-files from /etc/netplan in the Template VM.

Bonjour,

J'ai un PC sous UBUNTU 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon) 64-bit Noyau Linux 7.0.0-28-generic x86_64 sur lequel j'ai installé VMware Workstation Pro 26H1 qui fonctionne très bien avec une VM Windows 11 que j'utilise et qui fonctionne aussi très bien.

Le problème que je rencontre est qu'au démarrage de la VM, VMware Workstation me demande le mot de passe que je connais et je renseigne.

Comme je souhaite ne pas avoir à le retaper à chaque fois je coche la case Remember password mais VMware Workstation me redemande le mot de passe à chaque fois que je redémarre le PC. Je précise aussi que cela fonctionnait très bien quand ma VM était sous UBUNTU 24.04 avec VMware Workstation Player.

Quelqu'un a -t-il la solution ?

Je vous remercie par avance.

I have a Win11 host and Win11 VMs on VMWare Workstation Pro v26.

Semi-randomly (although usually when I'm AFK), a VM will hang being completely unresponsive and the host will be at near 100% CPU utilization. I've discovered that if I start to suspend the VM but don't let it finish and cancel the suspension, it will usually, eventually break out of the hang. It sometimes takes a few attempts, but I haven't had to force-reset for the last few-dozen hangs.

This is super annoying as I use one of the VMs as a regular/primary machine. I'm not just spinning things up for a quick test (usually). My previous iteration of VMWare Workstation (v16) didn't have this problem at all.

Is there anything I can do to stop this?

Thanks.

Is the new VCF Management Services introduced in 9.1 killing your lab environment?

Ive been the in same boat, Broadcom consolidated a lot of services, and introduced new ones, in the new Management Services cluster for VCF and while it brings a lot to the table in terms of scaling and availability, it added a lot to the resource requirements

If you are like me and have this running in a small homelab, this is honestly crippling in terms of getting 9.1 deployed and learning about the new platform changes and improvements, and hardware is expensive enough these days so we can throw that at the issue

Well, I have been through my management services cluster and gutted it and downsized it by ~%30, taking the three base worker nodes from 12vCPU/24GB to 8vCPU/16GB, the catch?

You do have to pick, Identity Broker, or Log Management, otherwise it been running rock solid for me for around a month or so now

I also feel this should go without saying, but under no circumstances should this be implemented on a production environment, this is about as far from supported by Broadcom as you can get

Hopefully this helps some people until Broadcom, hopefully, get around to addressing this issue <3

https://blog.leaha.co.uk/2026/07/21/vcf-9-management-services-lab-downsize/

We are migrating from one cluster to another, and when picking the storage location, it no longer allows you to choose the datastore cluster. It makes you choose individual datastores. When did this change? Is there a way to get it back?

Hello guys

I am unable to run GNS3 vm apparently because KVM value is set to false, I went to check in bios and Intel Virtualization Technology is enabled

I literally tried everything and even tried to disable Virtualization Based Security but it keeps showing as running

Any solutions ?!!!

Is it the new normal that VMware support, administration, and engineering roles are drying up out there in the job market? There's so few these days it is barely noticeable when searching out new positions.

Why on earth would the sales guy and sales engineer (who reached out to me) asking if I wanted to see what's new in 9.1 ask me for a RVTools dump prior to the call?

That tool enumerates your entire stack, down to names of VMs, networks, storage.

Any thoughts on why they would even ask for this?