Due to these security alerts and looking at VMware Knowledge Base it gives a list of thing to do. One of them is
For each virtual machine, enable Hypervisor-Assisted Guest mitigation via the following steps:
The question i have has anyone ever updated the hardware from the default v8 for vrops. and if so are there any tools updates to be done first?
I would wait on that. VMware is investigating their own virtual appliances and if virtual hardware should be upgraded. If so, they'll no doubt provide guidance. I saw a note on this yesterday or the day before from William Lam. That said, in one of my lab environments here I did upgrade my vROps 6.6.1 appliance from v8 to v9 and see no issues. There's no internal tools upgrades needed since you're not altering the hardware configuration, just the compatibility version.