To maintain functionality, the environment must periodically communicate with Broadcom to verify entitlement. While "air-gapped" workarounds exist, they involve a manual request-and-response file transfer through the Broadcom Support Portal.

Broadcom has consolidated over 160 separate products into four core subscription bundles: Responding to Broadcom/VMware Licensing Changes - Intelisys

For years, IT professionals and home lab enthusiasts used GitHub repositories as a reference for trial keys. For ESXi 9.0, this approach is both ineffective and risky: