“Host SMBus controller not enabled!”

CentOS guest instances in VMware sometimes come up with the boot error message:

This error is being caused because VMware doesn’t actually provide that level interface for CPU access, but Ubuntu try to load the kernel module anyway.

How to fix it:

add the line:

Reboot.

NOTE: for older versions use blacklist i2c_piix4 instead.
NOTE: it works both in VMWare Fusion 5 and 6, and Ubuntu LTS 12.04 and 14.04