It might be a no brainer, but I think this post will save some time for people if they are using the google search engine well. It took me too much time to figure this out for such a simple thing as this.

Via my employer ITQ I am able to make use of the Carbon Black Cloud Workload Protection in my homelab. I never touched any of Carbon Black until now, and I just wanted to test it out. My colleague Age Roskam already wrote some really nice articles how to make your first steps together with VMware Carbon Black:

• Setup Carbon Black Workload Protection
  
• Installing Carbon Black Sensors

Although Age’s blog is mentioning the requirement of VMware Tools 11.2 or higher I didn’t notice it and after the succesful deployment of the CBCW appliance and connection to the Carbon Black cloud I ran into an issue that I couldn’t enable VM Workload Protection for any VM in my lab.

As you can see in the screenshot depicted above, the Carbon Black integrated UI said that the VM was not Eligible for enabling protection. Then I started looking at the VMware tools which was up-to-date (I am running the latest vSphere bits).

But I wasn’t aware that although you are running on the latest vSphere bits that does not mean that you are running the latest VMware Tools, I honestly never had thought about this in the past.

When downloading the latest VMware Tools (11.2.5) version from the my.vmware download website I was running this version as stated in the vSphere HTML5 Client:

Now I was able to succesfully enable Workload Protection for this Virtual Machine.