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PowerCLI remediation script for running NSX Edge on AMD Ryzen for VCF 9.0

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If you are planning to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 on an AMD Ryzen processor (consumer CPU), make sure you are aware of the required workaround to get the NSX Edge node to function properly, which I had shared the solution back in 2020.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the workaround is still applicable with VCF 9.0 due to lack of support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) with Ryzen processors. One of the challenges you could face depending on where you deploy the NSX Edge, since there is a new workflow that is built right into vCenter Server 9.0 and SSH is not enabled by default, which means you would need to go to VM Console of the NSX Edge VM to apply the workaround.


To make this even less fun, during this time the NSX Edge is going through its initialization process and because it fails to detect DPDK support, the required NSX services can not start and keeps re-trying which is not a bad thing. The reason the looping is a problem is because the workaround requires editing a configuration file and depending on how fast you can type, the initialization process will restart and cause your session to end and you now need to log back in, thus causing a less than ideal experience.

As you can probably guess, I got hit by this re-initialization loop and I just got tired of trying to be faster than the computer 😅

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Failed to locate kickstart on Nested ESXi VM CD-ROM in VCF 9.0

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If you are automating the installation of ESXi using a scripted installation (aka Kickstart) and the KS.CFG is located on a CD-ROM device and you happen to be using a Nested ESXi VM and see the following message:

cannot find kickstart file on cd-rom with path -- /KS.CFG


You are probably using an IDE-based controller for the CD-ROM device, which the underlying IDE driver for ESXi has been removed as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.


The fix is to simply remove the IDE controller and use a SATA controller and things will work as expected!

NVMe Tiering with Nested Virtualization in VCF 9.0

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The NVMe Tiering feature was first previewed with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and the feature is now officially supported with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0! 🎉

Since the original tech preview, all major limitations and unsupported workload profiles that would prevent an organization from deploying NVMe Tiering in production has been resolved as part of the VCF 9.0 release.

Although Nested Virtualization is NOT officially supported, many users rely on Nested ESXi for testing, development, and learning purposes. With that said, if you have NVMe Tiering enabled on an ESXi 9.0 host and you attempt to power on a Nested ESXi VM or VM that is configured with Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV), it will fail to power on with the following error message as shown in the screenshot below.


While it was possible to use Nested ESXi with the tech preview of NVMe Tiering, it was just not in scope as part of productizing NVMe Tiering for VCF 9.0.

All hope is not lost, while Nested Virtualization is still NOT officially supported by Broadcom, it is a very useful feature not just for our users but also for internal development purposes and after speaking with the tech lead for NVMe Tiering, this is something that will be addressed in a future update of VCF and this is just a short term limitation for now if you intend to run Nested ESXi workloads.