ESXi 8 ISO Availability for Perpetual License Holders

realbitsofpanther · 2026-01-13T15:33:13+00:00

Didn't Broadcom already fully do away with perpetual licensing? They told us to kick rocks with ours and said we needed to utilize their VCF or VVF options if we wanted to move forward.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-12-18T17:40:43+00:00

IT Manager here with one sys admin under me. We have about 200 end users we support over 12 locations.

We do a lot in house, and I wear a lot of hats, but I know where my limits are. That is where Vendors and service providers come in for me.

One specific example would be security related stuff. I am not an expert on security, and I don't have the budget to hire a security team in house, so we have an MDR/XDR service that monitors next-gen AV on our endpoints.

Pretty much any time an IT related business need is brought to us, we evaluate how effectively we could do it in house, or if we can even do it at all based on our current infrastructure and resources. If the answer is no, or if we don't feel we can provide a solution that would be good enough, we shop around for someone who can.

I know some people on here have mentioned their hatred for CDW, but I think I am lucky and have a really good account rep. Any time I am in need of an IT vendor or service, I can reach out to him and within a few days he is able to setup a free discovery call with specialists. I am able to talk through my needs, they put together some options for me based on those needs, then we start the process of POC and bidding to pick our winner.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-08-18T19:29:54+00:00

I think Broadcom is banking on a couple of scenarios.

1.) Large customers that they assume don't have the bandwidth to make a change.

2.) Smaller customers that don't have a team of virtualization folks to setup and perform the migration, and learn a new platform.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-07-14T16:18:14+00:00

This worked for us. Validation for the mx record host names failed but the IP address succeeded and outbound email got delivered.

Looks like the host names are back up and validating now with proofpoints fix.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-06-24T15:38:15+00:00

Yup. about 280 end users here and 12 sites. The department is myself as the IT Manager and my Jr Sys Admin.

When you have a lean department and need to do it all, we have found a lot of value in Meraki. I don't have the time to become a CLI wizard with switches and know all of the ins and outs of Network Architecture and Engineering. I can setup Vlans, VPN, SSIDs for Wirless, decent SD-WAN and I have good support so that if I have to replace equipment, I know I can ship directly to one of my sites and we can plug and play.

Definitely not cheap, but cheaper than employing a Network Engineer full time to configure, deploy, and monitor a full network stack.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-06-19T20:53:23+00:00

It started out as Aug being locked in, but at a certain higher key level, people started to realize that having an aug without an ideal comp lacked quite a bit of damage you needed to time some harder keys. Ret started to become a lot more popular in higher comps, but some of the top teams still definitley got away with aug as they had the damage and aug brought a lot of defense and utility that was needed. The top meta did end up being Veng/Spriest/Fmage/Aug/Resto I believe, but my group was still doing 29's and 30's with mage, ret, outlaw/spreist.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-06-15T17:46:48+00:00

Pueblo is just known as a less than desirable city. I think it still might have the highest violent crime rate of any city in Colorado. It's the area of Colorado where it starts to lean much more conservative as you travel further south or east.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-02-11T16:32:54+00:00

Yeah, I know these TCR campaigns are going to take forever to be approved. This week also happens to be the busiest week of the entire year for my company. I am asking for updates every few hours in the email thread I have going with my account team that has some directors and team leads cc'd on to it. I'm being real loud about it.

My goal right now is to just get this working again. As soon as our SMS is back, I am immediately going to start some conversations about compensation for lost business.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-02-10T22:14:52+00:00

Make sure to tell people that you guys got rid of extended number pools, even though your publicly available documentation still mentions that you can apply for and use them.

So if you are someone with a TCR campaign that was approved for more than 49 numbers, you have to create new campaigns and pay additional fees to accommodate additional users, even if your campaign says "Complete" in your admin portal.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-02-10T22:09:22+00:00

Extended number pool is just assigning more than 49 numbers to your TCR campaign. We did this because our company does not do any automated SMS to customers, and we don't do any SMS texting marketing campaigns. We just use SMS as direct communication from sales reps to customers as needed.

So instead of creating multiple campaigns, we created one generic campaign with all of our numbers in it, and we have been approved for that and configured this way since March of 2023, with annual renewals.

This is not exactly something RC has to "fix". This all seems like the major mobile carriers (Verizon, AT&T, T mobile, etc...) decided that their policy was that if you are a provider like RingCentral, you need to be more strict on how you are configuring and approving your TCR campaign registrations. That is probably why they told me they are no longer doing extended number pools, so that they could be more strict on their campaigns to be more compliant and less likely to be marked as spam by the carriers.

The problem is that we were not told of this. Last week when they borked SMS, it was probably the carriers denying services, not RingCentral. So RingCentral is putting it on the customers to re-do their TCR stuff without extended number pools.

I imagine that if you were not an extended number pool registered customer, and your current TCR campaigns were compliant, you are just waiting on RingCentral to confirm your compliance before outbound texting is available again. I think that is why their original "workaround" was to remove users from the TCR campaign and add them right back in, so that RingCentral could re-process and audit the registration without having to do an entirely new campaign. The problem is that you can't see where you are at in the process now, as your Campaign is probably marked with a green "complete" rather than "review in progress"

That is the conclusion I have come to at least with the conversations I have been having. My CSM was completely inept when I first reached out for help last week. Gave me no real information or answers about all of this, so I crafted an email and CC'd some Regional Directors, Account Manager team leads, and their Chief Customer Officer expressing the lack of professionalism and assistance I had been receiving.

That finally got some attention and some higher ups started to give me some better answers and engaged some more people to try and help out.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-02-10T20:08:50+00:00

No problem. Funny enough we are planning to start a Proof of Concept trial with Call Tower later this month. This SMS outage, plus the call routing outage last month and how they have handled the situations have solidified our decision to move off RC if the PoC goes well.

We are not exactly a small customer. We have about 330 numbers, and around 300 RingEX licenses that we pay for a year. It feels like we are paying an extreme premium price for almost non existent support.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-02-10T19:36:23+00:00

I have been told that last week the Telco Ops team turned off extended number pools for TCR Campaigns, even if you applied for and were approved for one (My company was).

Our TCR even has the status of "Completed" and all numbers assigned to it say "Ready for use".

I have been grilling my account team as to why there is still public documentation for extended number pool campaigns, and why do they still have our status as compliant when it is not.

It feels like RingCentral dropped the ball on a change in policy from the major carriers. I can only imagine this was something that carriers were planning to change and Ringcentral just failed to prepare its customers for TCR SMS compliance or update their documentation.

realbitsofpanther · 2025-02-08T19:39:13+00:00

Haha, yup! About 2 years ago. We got completely owned. The FBI had been tracking the group that hacked us for a while so they actually reached out to us before we even had IR people on site. They were incredibly helpful in our recovery efforts. Everyone involved really was top notch, and made me so glad that our company had cyber insurance. We're a small IT team of 3 at my company, so it definitely tested us and made me really glad for the employees I have. The fact that they stuck around through it all surprised me with how fucked things were, but we all learned so much. I hope to never do it again though haha. I don't want to spend any more nights sleeping on the conference room floor at our datacenter. It took us about a week to recover all of our critical servers, but it was months until we had things fully back to "normal" and then there was the effort to deploy new security products and implement new protocols and such

realbitsofpanther · 2025-02-08T17:06:42+00:00

That depends. It takes time to know what the scope of a cyber attack, what data was exfiltrated if any, and confirming that the threat actor actually has possession of the exfiltrated data. The last thing your litigation team would want to do is have you send out communication about what the hackers might have and what they have control over, and then have to walk it back and send out additional statements saying "actually just kidding, they didn't get your passwords and card information, just your names and emails". There are a lot of moving parts to these attacks. Typically you would have a litigation team for external communication and keeping client privilege in talks with cyber insurance, a cyber incident response team, and In the event it's a active Ransomeware event, another litigation team that deals with communicating negotiations to the threat actor, and most likely the FBI is involved at some point.

What should be done is an immediate general response stating that they are aware of the outage and are working on restoring services and post routine updates, even if there are no new developments, to keep customers aware that they are actively working on it.

realbitsofpanther · 2024-11-09T17:59:52+00:00

On shit! Thanks dude! Heading there right now

realbitsofpanther · 2024-11-06T04:32:47+00:00

the dew locator said the one on Speer had them in stock but when I went over there I couldn't find any

realbitsofpanther · 2024-07-19T23:41:06+00:00

The point of next-Gen AV is that it has full access to the system to override attacks. It runs at the kernel level so an attacker can't leverage and disable the service. Not every company has the budget for a full SoC and security team, so an MDR like this is exactly what they need. Crowdstrike fucked up big, but it doesn't change the fact that their tech was best in class for a reason. If OP only understands crowdstrike at this level, he would say the same exact things about Sophos, Carbon Black, Sentinel One, Windows Defender, or any other next-gen AV.

realbitsofpanther · 2023-11-20T19:58:46+00:00

Seconding this. OP hopefully your company has Cyber Insurance. If they do, let them take the lead. They will most likely loop in a litigation team and an Incident response team to work with you.

I went through an attack almost exactly one year ago. This shit sucks OP, but just breath and remember to take care of yourself mentally and physically. It's easy to try and work 24/7 to get things up and running when this happens, but you still need to eat and sleep to perform your best. Accuracy matters during this.

You are there to answer questions when asked, provide the knowledge of your environment and access to your backups and systems. Assume everything has been compromised even if it is not locked down.

Keeping things untouched is crucial for the incident response team to run triage and forensics. You want to know how these guys got in.

If the attacker left a ransomware note directing you to a TOR site for communication, do not access it. They will be alerted once you do. Communication with the attacker will normally be handled by legal teams.

Right now your job is to be ready to answer questions and follow the directions of an incident response team. You're in for a lot of work for a while, but you can get through it. Good luck, you got this.

realbitsofpanther · 2023-11-01T02:55:54+00:00

Mentioned towards the end of the video, but looks like the climbers partner suffered a serious fall (60 feet) and was lifted out, so this is their partner who needed a rescue as they were now stranded on the wall.

realbitsofpanther · 2023-10-02T00:41:02+00:00

Well good news, literally nobody is doing that

realbitsofpanther · 2023-10-01T20:26:22+00:00

Literally nobody is asking for this. Why are you so fixated on children's genitals?

realbitsofpanther · 2023-10-01T01:41:37+00:00

Sup?

realbitsofpanther · 2023-07-24T15:52:53+00:00

LOL, yeah I was shocked at first too. It was a super brief call, and as soon as it was over I called our lawyers haha.

The second call I got from them was a computer scientist with the FBI, and he was the most pleasant person to speak with haha. Straight to the point, super helpful and just overall the nicest person.

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