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VCF 9.1 - Deploying the VCF License Server Directly to an ESX Host

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For most customers, a single VCF License Server, which is automatically deployed as part of a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) deployment, is sufficient to provide centralized license management for all VCF components. A single VCF License Server and VCF Operations instance can manage both VCF and VVF entitlements, so deploying additional VCF License Servers provides no additional benefit.


While additional VCF License Servers (LS) can certainly be deployed, the primary use cases are replacing an existing VCF LS or supporting extreme edge deployments where vCenter Server has limited connectivity to the primary data center and requires a VCF LS to be co-located with the edge deployment.

The VCF LS is provided as a virtual appliance in OVA format. The typical deployment workflow uses vCenter Server, where the VCF LS uses OVF properties, like most virtual appliances, to configure itself during deployment.

With that said, if you need to deploy the VCF LS directly to an ESX host, this is certainly possible using OVF Tool, which can inject the required OVF properties as part of the deployment workflow.

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VCF 9.1 - Are You Using the Correct ESXCLI Command to Enable NVMe Tiering?

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Historically, enabling NVMe Tiering prior to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 was not very user friendly, as it required users to remember three distinct ESXCLI commands.

# Enable or Disable NVMe Tiering
esxcli system settings kernel set -s MemoryTiering -v TRUE

# Configure the Tiering % 
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /Mem/TierNvmePct -i 100

# Configure NVMe device for with NVMe Tiering
esxcli system tierdevice create -d /vmfs/devices/disks/${NVME_TIERING_DEVICE}

By now, most users have probably made a mental note of these commands, with some even incorporating them into their automated ESX Kickstart deployments (example), so it is something you do not have to remember.

VCF 9.1 introduces a new method for enabling and configuring NVMe Tiering that is significantly simpler and no longer requires a system reboot. As a result of these improvements, the ESXCLI commands used in previous releases will no longer properly enable NVMe Tiering in VCF 9.1 and later.

I have seen an increasing number of users, both internally and externally, report that they have enabled NVMe Tiering, only to discover that it was never properly activated due to the use of the legacy ESXCLI commands.


Users will typically share a screenshot from vCenter Server similar to the one above, and there are two dead giveaways that NVMe Tiering was not properly enabled.

  • The first is the traditional memory capacity view, which does not reflect the combined memory capacity based on the configured NVMe Tiering ratio.
  • The second is the new Memory Tiering widget in the vSphere UI, where the Tier 1 capacity, representing the NVMe Tiering device capacity, shows a value of 0.

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ESX Passthrough of AMD Ryzen Integrated Graphics (iGPU)

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I recently had a conversation with Wenchao (creator of AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling and Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) about the incredible work he has done to support the VMware/Broadcom community. His latest contributions has really closed the capability gap when running ESX on popular AMD Ryzen platforms like the Minisforum MS-A2, which been an ideal system for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 in a lab environment.

The only remaining capability we have not yet been able to take advantage of is the integrated graphics (iGPU) on modern AMD Ryzen systems, which have become surprisingly powerful for running AI models.

While this has been a topic I have researched quite extensively and even spent time debugging with Engineering, it is always great to get a new perspective on things. I kid you not, a few days later Wenchao came back with a solution that had a few caveats which I was able to help iron out with some of my prior experience in this area. 😆

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