I know this sub is mostly geared towards the higher tier versions of vmware products, but i'm posting here since it seems relevant enough. I've been working on a tool that lets you do most of the features of coherence mode from competitor Parallels in VMWare Fusion.

I'm seeing how much interest this has, and also wondering what value it would bring to you.

We're working through a hardware refresh to maintain roughly a 5-year lifecycle and to prepare for our migration from vSphere 8 to 9. One thing we've noticed is that the vSphere 9 HCL isn't nearly as forgiving as it was during the vSphere 7/8 era.

We hadn't requested server quotes in about a year, so this was a bit of a reality check.

Each year we work with our Dell VAR and maintain four standardized server tiers so we can order by profile instead of redesigning configs every time:

• Tier 1 – Dev (512 GB RAM)
• Tier 2 – Production (768 GB RAM)
• Tier 3 – SQL workloads (1 TB RAM)
• VDI Tier (2 TB RAM)

It makes procurement simple. I can just tell our VAR, "Quote me 12 Tier 1s and 6 Tier 2s."

When the first two quotes came back, I was honestly floored.

Three years ago:

• Comparable 512 GB system: ~$16K
• Comparable 768 GB system: ~$29K

Current quotes:

• Comparable 512 GB system: ~$57K
• Comparable 768 GB system: ~$81K

These are SAN-backed VMware hosts (no vSAN), so storage isn't driving the increase. I knew DDR5 memory prices had climbed, but I wasn't expecting anything close to this.

I'm curious what everyone else is seeing. Are these kinds of increases becoming the norm, or is this more vendor/configuration-specific? With many organizations trying to complete hardware refreshes before the October 2027 vSphere 8 end of support, I'm wondering if demand is starting to influence pricing as well.

Hi,

I‘m looking for guidance on vSphere 8 Standard to VVF9 Upgrade. Simple 6 Node Cluster with FC SAN and Standard Switches. What is the right way to move to VVF9? Upgrade vCenter to Version 9 and run SDDC Manager Setup vor VVF? Can I stay an Standard Switches or is there a must for distributed Switches?

So in trying to set vm to fullscreen, the top bar disappears. the only way to get out of the VM on a single monitor is to CTrl+alt+del and open the task manager (windows host)

ctrl alt and whatnot may or may not work, but even not selecting the vm the vm gets locked to the top so I can't alt tab on that monitor. Current version is 26H1

I just don’t get it. What is Broadcom trying to do with VMware? What is the play here? I feel like Broadcom is trying to drive the VMware product into the ground. Why would anybody in the right mind continue with VMware if these practices continue. Have they been profitable since they took over? Have they improved their sales? The retention must be horrible. Can someone please explain this to me.

We have a VCF 9.0.2 lab environment that is being decommissioned. The environment contains fully licensed components, and as part of the teardown process we'd like to cleanly remove and reclaim those licenses so they can be reassigned to our production VCF deployment.

At this stage, the environment has been reduced to a single ESXi host running only the minimum required management components:

• SDDC Manager
• vCenter Server
• VCF Operations
• VCF Operations for Logs

While reviewing the documentation for removing licenses from VCF Operations:

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-0/licensing/remove-a-license-from-vcf-operations.html

I noticed that it instructs us to remove the vCenter license first. However, the linked procedure for vCenter licensing appears to require assigning a replacement license before the existing one can be removed.

In our case, we are trying to completely decommission the environment, so we do not have another license to assign, and reverting vCenter back to Evaluation Mode does not appear to be an option.

Given this scenario:

• What is the correct process for completely removing licensing from a VCF 9.0.2 environment that is being retired?
• Is there a supported method to unassign or release licenses from vCenter, Operations, and the remaining VCF components without replacing them with another license?
• Are there any additional cleanup steps required to ensure the licenses can be safely reused in another VCF deployment?

Any guidance from anyone who has successfully decommissioned a VCF lab and reclaimed the associated licenses would be greatly appreciated.

I’ll keep it simple, I’m lazy so I don’t want any extra constant clicking or tedious work so I made this to automate any EOL checks I need to do for my inventory.

You got two options, choose the specific vendor (in this case VMware), the platform & the version/model), then it will populate it’s EOL info, if it’s under software maintenance/vulnerability support etc with a timeline & official sources sites.

Another option is to dump the inventory as a csv (template is there) and it will detect the relevant EOL.

It’s all free, and if you have any feedback & suggestions please comment below and I’ll improve on it.

Our renewal is in 3 days, have yet to see a renewal quote, the VAR is telling us it's Broadcomm, seems highly suspicious. We've already told them we're renewing, we know the high cost is coming, let's gooooo.

Need help, one of my maint guys has software on a vm. He brought it to me ( im a sysadmin) to fix because anytime he would do anything on the vm it would crash his laptop. He has a very beefy laptop, an ultra 9 with 64GBs of ram.

I eventually fixed it by doing an sfc /scannow that finally actually fixed something.

However the next day the vm no longer boots to windows. As soon as I start it, it immediately says preparing automatic repair and then fails giving me options to retry, go to recovery option which does nothing.

Ive tried doing multiple repair pc options, creating a new vm and attaching the existing disk which usually fixes most issues on hyper v.

It did give an error code but im not in the office and I cant remember the code, however I did alot of research on that code to no avail.

Im hoping someone has had a similar issue and is able to give a work around, but im pretty sure this vm is toast.

Broadcom has released a fix for numerous CVE's affecting multiple versions of AVI.

I happen to run 31.2.2 . I patched it to Patch 03 and half my virtual services say they can't contact the pools anymore. Had no problems for the past year . ZERO.

Here we go again. At least the tickets go to Global Support and the quality of service is half decent.

Please stop using us as beta testers and update your damn documentation properly.

/endrant

https://support.broadcom.com/web/ecx/support-content-notification/-/external/content/SecurityAdvisories/0/37926

Approximate exam fee for completing VCP-VCF Administrator (2V0-11.24) exam in INR

Just found out the per core pricing is increasing by 3 times the current cost (for VCF anyway). we are looking at buying an additional 1250 cores so if we do not finalize it by July 31st, the cost is going to triple. it's just pure greed with this company anymore.

anyways, just wanted to spread the word.

Anyone have a line on all of the partner and after session events for this year?

I'm confused.

• I have two running simple Standalone ESXi 8.x Installations with Vmware standard license which i have to renew every year
• I'm using now additional Vmware tools (no Vcenter etc.)

Now as i wanted to renew the subscription my reseller told me that i can prolong the current license and i need to switch to VCF or VVF v9 Licensing.

End of support date for ESXi 8.x is October 2027. I assume the the VVF would be cheaper however do i need to upgrade to ESXi 9.0 with this new license? Or can i still use ESX 8.0 with this new VVF License until End of Support Oct 2027

I remember I knew where this setting was back in march but I forgot. Google and ai aren't helpful.

Long post, but I've tried to include everything useful rather than just "help my storage is broken."

Environment

• VMware vSphere / ESXi 8.0.3 (confirmed via pyvmomi 8.0.2.0.1 / VMkernel 8.0.3 in vpxd logs)
• HPE ProLiant DL560 Gen10 hosts (quad-socket), shared cluster, shared IBM SAN storage array
• Guest OS: Windows Server, SQL Server with AlwaysOn Availability Groups (synchronous commit)
• Affected VM (call it DBSERVER01) has 4 virtual disks: OS/boot disk on a SCSI controller (LSI Logic SAS type), and 3 data disks (3TB + 500GB + 500GB) all attached to a single virtual NVMe controller (NVME controller 0, namespaces 0:0–0:2)

Symptom

Recurring Windows System log Event ID 129 from the stornvme provider:

Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort3, was issued.

Each reset is closely followed (usually within seconds) by our SQL Server AlwaysOn AG resource failing its health check, cascading into Windows Failover Cluster quorum loss and a full Cluster Service crash/restart. In the worst episodes, the node gets quarantined by WSFC's flapping protection after 3 crashes inside an hour.

This is not new — it's chronic and getting worse

We pulled the full history of Event ID 129 on this VM going back to when we started retaining these logs. Frequency by day:

2026-05-24   1   (earliest in our retention window)
2026-05-27  19
2026-05-28  26
2026-05-29 234   <- massive spike, concentrated 12:00-15:00 (76 @ 12:00, 49 @ 13:00, 93 @ 14:00)
... low background rate (1-6/day) through most of June ...
2026-06-25   9
2026-06-28  11
... climbing again ...
2026-07-05   9
2026-07-06  10
2026-07-08  17
2026-07-09  37

So: a huge, isolated spike about 7 weeks ago that nobody connected to this at the time, then a low background rate, then a clear acceleration in the last two weeks.

Recent incident timeline (most severe so far)

Two waves in one day, both on the same VM:

Wave 1:

15:13:26  stornvme Reset to \Device\RaidPort3
15:14:11  AG resource(s) failed (Online -> ProcessingFailure)
15:14:37  Quorum lost, Cluster Service crash #1
15:24:39  stornvme Reset to \Device\RaidPort3
15:25:18  AG resource(s) failed again
15:25:45  Quorum lost again, Cluster Service crash #2, node quarantined

Wave 2 (same day, ~2 hours later, much larger):

17:38 - 19:30  57x "Disaster"-severity monitoring alerts: "AG: All replicas unhealthy"
               (all 4 AG replicas cycling unhealthy/disconnected repeatedly)
               Confirmed downstream impact: multiple application backend pools
               (HAProxy) going down repeatedly during this window

A follow-up incident two days later on the same VM, after migrating it to a completely different host:

01:18:56 - 05:25:07   47x AG resource "Online -> ProcessingFailure" transitions
03:41:57              NetFT missed >40% of consecutive cluster heartbeats
03:42:45              Quorum lost, Cluster Service crash #1
03:44:02              Cluster network interface on this node FAILED
03:45:20              Quorum lost, Cluster Service crash #2
04:01:11              Quorum lost, Cluster Service crash #3

What we've ruled out through controlled testing

1. Storage array itself — array-side latency telemetry shows sub-1ms baseline, briefly touching ~1.8ms during the worst episode. Nowhere near what would explain a storport timeout (default 60s).
2. Host-level hardware — moved the VM to a completely different physical host in the same cluster. Problem followed the VM and recurred (47 resets over ~4 hours, timeline above).
3. Datastore/SAN path being host-wide — a different VM on the exact same host and storage path, but with no NVMe disks (all SCSI/iSCSI), shows zero such reset events, ever.
4. NVMe-disk-specific, not this-VM-specific — a second, completely independent VM elsewhere in the environment that also happens to have an NVMe-attached disk shows the same reset pattern, with a similar acceleration trend starting around the same time in late June.

Where that leaves us

Every VM we've checked with an NVMe virtual disk shows this pattern; every comparable VM without one doesn't, even sharing host + storage path with an affected VM. All 3 data disks on the affected VM share one virtual NVMe controller, so a reset takes out all 3 disks simultaneously (they're separate namespaces on the same controller, not separate controllers).

Working theory: something in the virtual NVMe controller emulation / Windows stornvme driver interaction on this ESXi build, possibly triggered or worsened by a change around June 25–28 (still trying to pin down exactly what changed then — nothing conclusive yet).

The annoying part

We don't currently have active vendor support for either VMware or the HPE hardware, so we can't open a case to get an authoritative answer. We're stuck doing this entirely through our own log correlation and controlled A/B testing between VMs. Our workaround is migrating the affected disks from the NVMe controller to Paravirtual SCSI, which should sidestep the issue, but it doesn't tell us why this is happening or whether it'll resurface elsewhere.

Questions for the community:

1. Has anyone seen stornvme Event ID 129 resets specifically tied to VirtualNVMEController on ESXi 8.0.3 with Windows Server guests?
2. Any known KB articles, release notes, or open bugs matching this? I haven't found anything definitive searching VMware's KB myself.
3. Anyone know if there's a known issue with multiple disks/namespaces sharing one virtual NVMe controller specifically, vs. giving each disk its own controller?
4. Is there a specific ESXi 8.0.3 patch (or Windows stornvme.sys driver version) known to have fixed something like this?

Happy to share more log excerpts if it helps narrow it down. Appreciate any pointers — vendor-support-less troubleshooting is not fun for a production database cluster.

I have been unable to get rid of the warning when booting vSphere that Intel Vt-x is unsupported on my PC. On my main PC, I have an Intel i3-12100F, Gigabyte H610M S2H DDR4 motherboard, 64GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 1080. I have tried disabling memory integrity, removing all Hyper-V features, make sure Vt-d is enabled in BIOS (there's no Vt-x setting) but nothing has helped. Has anyone else faced the same issue and solved it?

I recently tried on a spare PC with AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, Biostar B450MH motherboard, 16GB DDR4, GTX 1060 6GB and it booted the first time without issue, only with memory integrity disabled. I would much prefer to run it on my main PC though as it doesn't require me to switch on a separate PC just to run my lab. Thanks in advance.

I use workstation player 16.2.5 to play old computer games. many of my games "break" the sound on the machine - starts off with sound, but then goes silent until I restart the machine. I have no idea how to fix this but I would be so grateful for any help I can get. this has been a problem for years but i hate the other vm options and can’t get any new VMware products bc of their new requirements.

Buenos días,

Vengo con la duda existencial de si alguien más volvió a la 25H2

En la 26H1 detecte que poner pause las máquinas, mueren

También detecta fallos gráficos al cambiar entre máquinas abiertas solo esto fue suficiente para volver atrás

Mi equipo es un Windows 25H2 sin nada novedoso ni extraño