No essay on HPE ESXi 6.7 would be complete without addressing its sunset. VMware ended General Support for ESXi 6.7 on , with Technical Guidance ending in October 2023. However, HPE provided extended support for its custom drivers and management tools until December 2023. Consequently, as of 2026, running HPE ESXi 6.7 in production is a significant risk. The hypervisor no longer receives security patches for vulnerabilities such as those found in the virtual SCSI controller or the VMX process, and HPE’s latest ProLiant Gen11 servers no longer provide drivers for the 6.7 kernel.
Yet, the legacy persists. Many air-gapped industrial control systems (power plants, manufacturing lines) and legacy healthcare devices (CT scanners, MRI workstations) continue to run HPE ESXi 6.7 out of necessity—because the proprietary software on their virtual machines cannot be upgraded to support newer hypervisors. For these environments, HPE’s long-term stability and the ability to run on Gen9 and Gen10 servers (which officially supported 6.7) make it a preserved, if fossilized, workhorse. hpe esxi 6.7
VMware ESXi 6.7, released in April 2018, was the final iteration of the 6.x branch, representing a polished, bug-fixed, and performance-tuned version of its predecessors. Unlike its successor, vSphere 7, which would dramatically refactor the hypervisor, ESXi 6.7 focused on stability and scale. Key capabilities included support for up to 768 logical CPUs and 24 TB of RAM per host, alongside enhanced vMotion capabilities that allowed cross-version live migration (useful for phased upgrades). For HPE customers, this meant that dense blade enclosures like the Synergy 12000 frame could be fully saturated with memory-heavy workloads, such as large Oracle or SQL Server databases. The hypervisor’s native support for Persistent Memory (PMem) in simulation mode also allowed HPE shops to begin testing Intel Optane DC persistent memory modules, bridging the gap between DRAM speed and storage capacity. No essay on HPE ESXi 6