Licensing is now exclusively subscription-based and managed through license files rather than keys. VCF Operations Required: You must now use a VCF Operations

the features of ESXi 8.x (which still has a free key option) versus 9.0.

The term "portable" in this context usually refers to two distinct community efforts: VMware ESXi - endoflife.date

You can obtain a free license key from the VMware website.

Files claiming to provide license keys or "portable" ESXi are often malicious:

To obtain a legitimate VMware ESXi 9 license key, I recommend: