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USB Native Network Driver for ESXi supports Realtek RTL8157 & RTL8156BG

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In response to community feedback, we are excited to announce an update to the popular USB Native Network Driver for ESXi Fling . This release is currently available for ESXi 8.0 Update 3 and adds support for the latest Realtek USB devices: RTL8157 (5GbE) & RTL8156BG (2.5GbE), bringing the total number of supported chipsets to over 25+. A similar update is also planned for ESX 9.0, which will be published hopefully in the next few weeks.

Several of you have asked about specific models compatible with the latest Realtek chipset. Below are the two I am currently using for testing, which you can find the links below. If you have other recommendations that work, feel free to share them in the comments.

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Automating the Retrieval of VCF Installer Deployment Milestones

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When deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instance, whether converting an existing vSphere based environment or deploying a net new setup, the VCF Installer provides a graphical view of the current milestones and the individual tasks within each milestone.


While you likely will not sit and watch the progress of each step, you may want to retrieve the the progress programmatically, which can be accomplished by using the VCF Installer API.

Similar to the VCF Installer UI, we can also retrieve the individual milestones and get some additional useful information such as the start and end time for a given milestone. This can be handy if you want to understand how long each milestone is taking, which is not a view you can quickly find in the UI. To understand the duration for a given milestone with the UI, you need to look at the first and last task to understand the milestone duration.

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Cross vCenter vMotion workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0

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While vSphere 7.0 officially reached end of support in October 2025, many organizations continue to operate on it, often not by choice, and on hardware that is likely end of life.

An established transition strategy among enterprises is to migrate workloads into a newly deployed environment using the battle tested vSphere vMotion capability.

A lesser known capability introduced with both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 allows non-disruptive migration of workloads from vSphere 7.0 to vSphere 9.0, as the minimum supported version of the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is 7.0 as you can see from VDS creation workflow wizard.


Users currently have two supported methods for migrating workloads from their existing vSphere 7.0 environment into either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment using the native Cross vCenter vMotion capability.

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