At least tens of thousands of VMware ESXi servers have been end-of-life since October 15 and are no longer supported with security updates. Just for organizations that manage their IT environment via management tool Lansweeper, there are more than 45,000 servers. Lansweeper announced this in a blog post.
ESXi, part of VMware's vSphere, is a bare metal hypervisor for virtualizing operating systems. The virtualization software is installed directly on a server and can then load the virtualized operating system. As of October 15, vSphere 6.5.x and 6.7.x are no longer supported by VMware.
Lansweeper investigated the impact now that these versions are end-of-life. More than 6,000 organizations use the company's software to manage their IT environment. 79,000 ESXi servers were found among these customers. Of these, more than 45,000 (58 percent) are running on one of the two no longer supported versions. It was also found that there are more than 12,000 ESXi servers (16 percent) that have not received security updates for much longer.
Organizations are therefore advised to upgrade to a still supported version. In the past, vulnerabilities in ESXi have been used to infect organizations with ransomware.
