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vSphere 8 productizes Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi

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Back in July with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 3f, I had shared that all Intel i219 devices from the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi is now part of default ESXi 7.0 Update 3f installation. This simplified the ESXi installation process as customers no longer needed to create a custom ESXi ISO that contains the Fling driver.

While the e1000-community module within the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi has been productized, the Fling also includes another driver module called igc-community which adds support for Intel i220, i225 & i226 PCIe-based network devices. For recent Intel NUC platforms like the Intel NUC 11 (Panther Canyon & Tiger Canyon), Intel NUC 11 Extreme (Beast Canyon), Intel NUC 12 Extreme (Dragon Canyon) and Intel NUC 12 Pro (Wall Street Canyon) the Fling is still required for ESXi to recognize the onboard network interfaces.

As of vSphere 8, which was recently announced at VMware Explore US, I am happy ? (or jacked, jazzed, or pumped) to share that the Community Networking Driver Fling for ESXi will be fully productized! Customers who install ESXi 8.0 will no longer need to create a custom ESXi Image and the network devices listed on the Fling page will automatically be detected by ESXi.

How to manually clean up a Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) on an ESXi host?

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If an ESXi host was connected to a Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) and you were not able to properly remove it from the vCenter inventory, which cleans up the VDS as part of the removal, then you will be left with a stale VDS configuration.


Of course, the ideal workflow is to clean this up within vCenter Server but if you some how lost access or the vCenter Server was deleted and you might be wondering how to manually clean this up?

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vSphere ESXi 7.x will be last version to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization

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As a heads up, I just wanted to share that VMware has just published a new knowledge base article to communicate that ESXi 7.x will be the last major release to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization, which was originally introduced back in 2011 with the release of vSphere 5.0.

Last year, VMware had also published a blog outlining that they will no longer pursue hardware certification for the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 for ESXi and as unfortunate as this is, hopefully this updated news will not come as a surprise to any of our customers or partners due to the various challenges in supporting the Apple hardware platform with ESXi.

On a more personal note, this is also a bitter sweet end, I have been writing about Apple macOS Virtualization on ESXi since its inception almost exactly 11 years ago. I came to learn about the new virtualization capability during an on-site beta for vSphere 5.0 (codenamed MN) at VMware HQ back when I was a customer. Not only did our organization have a need for this capability, but this was also the time that Apple had announced EOL'ed of Apple XServe, which was the initial hardware platform that was officially supported. I still recall emailing our leadership after the on-site to purchase as many XServe as we could before you could no longer buy the systems so that we can enable our development teams who were building both iOS and macOS applications.

It certainly has been a wild ride over the years in advocating for our users and their plethora of use cases to getting the Apple Mac Mini to run ESXi like any other x86 platform and even getting the Apple Mac Mini added to the VMware HCL. I still remember all the hoops and hacks that one needed to jump through just to boot ESXi and over the years, various VMware Engineers have incrementally helped get us to where we are at today, so a big thanks for all of their support over the years.