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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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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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Identifying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) managed service accounts in vCenter Server

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When users log in to a vCenter Server to manage roles and permissions within a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 environment, they may notice several accounts that already have vSphere permissions assigned.


This might come as a surprise, especially if you do not recall creating these users, let alone granting them privileges within vCenter Server.

A large majority of the user accounts that you see are internal to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and represents the different application services running within the VCSA. There are also a handful of VCF accounts that are automatically created to enable communication between the various VCF components, but at the end of the day these are all service accounts that is either managed by vCenter Server or VCF.

With that said, it might be useful to understand which of these accounts are service accounts, so organizations can properly audit their environment for compliance and configuration management.

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