The Flexera Inventory Beacon collects virtual machine and host data by querying the vSphere Web Services API. Although the Free VMware ESXi (vSphere Hypervisor) license allows hosting virtual machines, it restricts the required API functionality for third-party tools to gather inventory. Consequently, inventory fails even when initial discovery appears successful.

The discovery phase may appear successful because basic connectivity and version identification do not require restricted API calls. In the Discovery.log, you will see:

[.DiscoveryTaskExecutor|PropertyDisco] [INFO ] Completed VMware discovery for device '192.0.2.1': Name 'VMware ESXi', Port '443', Protocol 'https', Version '6.0.0', ApiType 'HostAgent', ApiVersion '6.0'

The inventory task will fail soon after. In the VMWareInventory.log, you will see:

[.VirtualizationVisitor|Async] [INFO ] Result of type 'TaskType_V12nInventory' on target '192.0.2.1':

<TaskStatus Result="Failed" Type="VirtualInventory" Status="VMwareInfrastructureInventoryFailed" Duration="58.28" Credential="Your_VMWare_Server" StartDateTime="2025-12-18T12:00:00"/>