If you are interested in evaluating Microsoft Windows 11, in addition to the ISO image, you can now download a pre-configured Windows 11 image (OVF) that can run on any VMware Desktop Hypervisor (Workstation, Player and Fusion) for 90 days!
Per the documentation, the pre-built image includes the following:
This has been a difficult week for all VMware employees due to the pending acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. Many VMware employees are still waiting to hear back from Broadcom about their employment status either before and/or after the planned acquisition close date. I wanted to provide this context before sharing a quick update regarding the VMware Flings program.
On Tuesday October 24th, VMware Fling authors was made aware that the VMware Flings site (flings.vmware.com) would be taken down and website would simply be redirected to developer.vmware.com/samples starting on Thursday October 26th.
🚨📢 PSA - Folks, if you need particular VMware Fling, please download it NOW. On Thur (10/26), the site will no longer exists & simply redirected to Sample Exchange, where you may find some but most will not be there including some of mines. Hoping this is temp. but not sure https://t.co/vdz9uWAFvy
— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) October 24, 2023
The VMware Flings program was operated and run by VMware's Office of the CTO (OCTO) and while I do not have specifics on why it needed to go down, I tried my best to share out the news as broadly and as quickly as I could so that folks could at least grab what they needed. While the original notice mentioned the site would function up until 10/26 at 5pm PST, it looks VMware IT had already made the DNS changes and the redirect has already been propagated.
As of right now, I do not know the future of the VMware Flings program, but I did want to share a few updates since the site and its downloads are no longer available.
Several months back, I was helping a customer debug an issue where I needed to install the GA release of ESXi 6.7! Yikes, it certainly has been a minute since I have installed anything older than 7.x but I figured it should still work fine with recent hardware like an Intel NUC systems, right?
After the ESXi installer started to boot up, it eventually halted with the following message:
Shutting down firmware services...
Using 'simple offset' UEFI RTS mapping policy
I decided to give it one more go by using a more recent release of ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and to my surprise, not only did ESXi installed perfectly fine but I did not run into the error message shown abvove!
I then realized that perhaps this has something to do with the ESXi bootloader, like any piece of software, there are fixes and enhancements with newer releases. I also recall a conversation with one of our Engineers that the ESXi bootloader is also designed to be backwards compatible, so that gave me an idea to try replacing the default ESXi 6.7 GA bootloader files with the ones found in ESXi 6.7 Update 3 and now I was able to install ESXi 6.7 GA release!
However, my success did not last very long as I ran into a slightly different message after the initial reboot:
Shutting down firmware services…
UEFI runtime services support is disabled