Starting with VMware virtual hardware version 7, the VMCI device is enabled by default. Virtual machines upgraded from older hardware versions to version 7 acquire the VMCI device even if it was not present before upgrading the virtual hardware. The VMCI device cannot be removed. On most guest operating systems, VMware Tools should be installed to provide a VMCI device driver.

To address security concerns, VMware provided a method to restrict VMCI-based services that are available to a virtual machine. Services were restricted to a trusted subset of only the hypervisor-related services needed to run a virtual machine in isolation. Restricted was the default, as is now the only configuration.