There will never be a fix, this is by design. This is yet another example of VMWare’s give a little / take a lot approach they build into every release and seem to love to impose on their customers / user base.
- Give a little = Remove the 32GB memory limit from the free version
- Take a lot = Remove network, SATA, and other drivers, cripple vSphere Client management, move to a closed driver architecture (VMware Native Driver Architecture)
A lot of people are directly affected and indirectly affected by this. As this topic points out, this decision on VM’s part destroys passthrough, but what a lot of people don’t realize is, what if you had a datastore connected to that same onboard SATA port? No RAID, no passthrough, just a plain old disk. Guess what? Poof, goodbye. Thanx VMWare!
I’m not trying to spark yet another discussion on the supported hardware vs. non, or free vs. paid version. All I am trying to say is it blows my mind on how out of touch companies can be. Yes, most of these issues surround the whitebox clones, lab or home environments, etc. The point I think VMWare keeps missing is in my experience most of these labs or home environments are run as test environments by people or companies that spend hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in licensing, support, training, and supported hardware for their production environment but can’t afford to duplicate that kind of expense for a test or development environment.
Don’t get me wrong, I was (am) a huge proponent of VMWare, its been a lifesaver over the years. But after years of running VMWare in production and huge VMWare related capital expenditures it’s a shame VMWare has become so bad that we have recently been forced to seriously start looking at alternatives. We cannot afford (nor justify) the expense these upgrades / new versions impose on our development & test environments any longer.