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No entitlements needed for these popular VMware downloads on Broadcom Support Portal (BSP)

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As users are getting more familiar with the new Broadcom Support Portal (BSP), especially for downloading VMware software, an active entitlement is required for most downloads.

UPDATE (03/25/24) - Here is a direct link to all the Free downloads on the BSP https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/free-downloads

Note: If you are new to Broadcom Support Portal (BSP), be sure to check out my recent blog post on tips for navigating and downloading from BSP.

However, there are a number of VMware downloads that do NOT require an entitlement at all. After the exciting news from the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division on our Desktop Hypervisor Products (Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro) being available, completely FREE for personal use, I wanted to highlight other popular VMware downloads that also do not require an entitlement and more importantly where to navigate within the BSP site to download.

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Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances are now back under VMware Flings Community!

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I know many of our internal teams (field, engineering, support, etc.), customers and partners have heavily relied on my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliances (VA) over the years which makes it seamless to deploy both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) lab environments for learning, testing, troubleshooting, automation and development purposes. To support our customers in troubleshooting and prototyping purposes, I also make use of my Nested ESXi VAs on a regular basis and have found this to be invaluable in aiding my day to day work.

As part of the VMware by Broadcom "Day 2" transition, the hosting platform that housed my Nested ESXi downloads was no longer available and that impacted both the standalone Nested ESXi downloads but also the Nested ESXi Content Library, which provided a convenient way to subscribe to all the VAs from your vCenter Server.

Today, I excited to share that my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance downloads are back and they are now available under the VMware Flings program! 🥳

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Updating handshakeTimeoutMs setting for ESXi 7.x & 8.x using configstorecli

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With the introduction of the ESXi Configuration Store back in vSphere 7.0 Update 1, all ESXi configuration changes should be managed using either the configstorecli for an individual ESXi host or leveraging the new vSphere Configuration Profiles (VCP) for scale with vCenter Server.

For certain ESXi hostd configurations such as configuring the handshakeTimeoutUs property, which has changed locations from several locations including /etc/vmware/hostd/config.xml and /etc/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg to now /etc/vmware/rhttpproxy/config.xml in the latest ESXi 8.x release, it can be challenging to figure out the correct configstorecli syntax.

Having spent some time playing with the configstorecli, I was able to quickly help a customer recently who was looking to update the handshakeTimeoutUs property for ESXi 7.x and I wanted to make it easy for folks to find the syntax for both ESXi 7.x and 8.x.

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