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Improved Workaround for NSX Edge Deployment & Upgrade to VCF 9.0.2 running AMD Ryzen CPUs

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If you are using an AMD Ryzen (Consumer) CPU for your VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) lab environment, you have most likely have applied one of the required workarounds for either installing an NSX Edge (HERE) or upgrading an NSX Edge (HERE).

For those planning to install or upgrade to the latest VCF 9.0.2 patch release, which was just released today, you may come across this issue as shown in the screenshot below when attempting an NSX Edge upgrade.


While I have yet to run through the VCF 9.0.2 upgrade myself, a similar configuration file tweak from within the NSX Edge VM will be required. A colleague recently shared a more optimal trick for bypassing the non-supported AMD processor check, which would be simpler to implement for lab environments.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk.

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Disable HTTP Range Requests on Synology WebStation, Apache or Nginx

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I use my Synology NAS to host a variety of services including a web server, file server and a backup system. As part of some testing that I had been performing, I needed to ensure that my web server does not respond to HTTP Range Requests, which allow clients to retrieve specific byte ranges rather than downloading an entire resource in a single transfer.

We can check whether a web server supports HTTP Range Requests by specifying a range of bytes as demonstrated in this cURL example below:

curl -H "Range: bytes=0-10" -I http://depot.vcf.lab/PROD/vsan/hcl/lastupdatedtime.json -u $CREDS


You should receive an HTTP 206 response which indicates HTTP Range Requests is supported by your web server, which my Synology supports by default.

Unlike a traditional web server where disabling HTTP Range Requests is pretty straightforward, modifying the default behavior for Synology WebStation is slightly more complicated. After some trial and error, I was able to successfully disable HTTP Range Requests on my Synology system, and for those with a similar requirement, the following sections outline the steps for several popular web server backends.

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Quick Tip - Correlating VCF Component to Bundle ID/Name

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A VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) release consists of a collection of VCF components that is categorized as either an installation or patch/upgrade file. In VCF 4.x/5.x, a VCF component would contain two different identifiers, a UUID as well as something called a Bundle ID (e.g. bundle-XXX where XXX is some numeric number). In VCF 9.x, the old Bundle ID format is no longer used and simply converges with using the UUID, uniquely identifying a given VCF component.

When a customer downloads a VCF release, they only need to deal with the VCF release version (e.g. 5.2.1.0 or 9.0.1.0) and not the individual bundle IDs. With that said, if you need to download a specific VCF component, especially when using the VCF Download Tool (VCFDT), then it would helpful to understand the specific VCF component ID whether this is for VCF 4.x/5.x or VCF 9.x

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