"Leo, I need the ESXi 6.5 ISO. The portal is locked."

She pulled up the vSphere client. The payment processing VM booted automatically. Services resumed. Alerts cleared.

Desperate, she called her former mentor, Marcus, who now worked at a cloud consultancy. "Marcus, do you still have your old VMware lab?"

The console flickered. A familiar grey screen appeared, then text scrolled upward.

"I'm not asking for a license. I just need the vanilla ISO. Our production payment system is down."

The progress bar crept forward. 5%... 32%... 89%... Success. Reboot.

Her heart sank. The bank had let the support contract lapse on this legacy cluster because they were "planning to migrate next quarter." That was eighteen months ago.