WilliamLam.com

VCF 9.1 - OCuLink External Graphics (eGPU) Passthrough with vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)

by // Leave a Comment

The Minisforum MS-A2 continues to be a popular and versatile platform for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 in a lab environment. While the MS-A2 may be small in size, it is surprisingly capable and can even be configured to support an NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada (20GB VRAM) GPU, which I had used to deploy VMware Private AI Services (PAIS).

Although there are several half-height GPUs that can fit in an MS-A2, the overall selection remains relatively limited. For users looking for additional GPU flexibility, the MS-A2 supports an OCuLink half-height PCIe card, enabling the use of a much broader range of discrete GPUs.


Thanks to a fellow colleague who recently shared their success with me using this setup on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, including GPU passthrough to vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) cluster for AI experimentation, below are the specific BOM details for those interested.

[Read more...]

VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Uninstalling Optional Day-N Components

by // Leave a Comment

There are a number of new capabilities in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 that can be deployed as Day-N operations after the initial VCF Fleet deployment, including:


If you need to uninstall one of these Day-N components, there is currently not a UI workflow within the VCF LCM UI. With that said, we do have a KB article that provides a clean up script that can also be used to uninstall these optional VCF components.

[Read more...]

VCF 9.1 - Deploying VCF Operations for Networks to non-Management Network

by // Leave a Comment

Thanks to a fellow colleague, Abdullah, who reached out after coming across my blog posts (HERE and HERE) on how to deploy VCF Management Services (VCFMS) and VCF Automation (VCFA) on a non-management network as part of a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 upgrade. Using the same techniques, he was able to successfully deploy VCF Operations for Networks on a non-management network, which I thought was worth sharing an updated script with the broader community.

Similar to VCFMS and VCFA, VCF Operations for Networks (VON) is deployed using the Fleet Lifecycle Management (LCM) workflow in VCF Operations and, by default, both the platform and collector nodes are deployed onto the management network.


As you have probably guessed, we can use the Fleet LCM API to override this behavior and deploy VON on a non-management network!

[Read more...]