Last week the news of a fully unlocked ESXi 3.5 Update 3 turned many heads in the virtualization community.
Many were surprised that VMware didn’t make a major announcement for such a big change in its strategy. Now we know the reason: the Update 3 unlocked ESXi 3.5 by mistake.
Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer at VMware, clarifies:
Turns out that while fixing an API bug the API set got partially unlocked. Yes, you read that right, VMware didn’t mean to unlock the API set – at least not wholly and not yet.
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So, if you went out and started madly coding some killer VirtualCenter Client replacement then hold off because I’m told the U4 update will lock things back down again.
Now, for those that can’t wait, some analysis of the differences between the unlocked ESXi image and the locked one, plus some serious hacking, could make the (unsupported) trick.