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Quick Tip - Improved NVMe Tiering Device Health Monitoring in VCF 9.1

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Unfortunately, one of my consumer-grade NVMe SSD devices that I had configured for NVMe Tiering (Memory Tiering) in my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1.1 environment had recently degraded. While vCenter Server had raised an alarm stating “NVMe Memory Tiering device is not healthy.”, I had dismissed it since the alarm did not provide any additional details about the underlying issue.

In VCF 9.1, NVMe Tiering usage can be conveniently viewed inn the vSphere UI under the Memory tile for either a selected ESX host or vSphere Cluster, which summarizes both Tier 0 (DRAM) and Tier 1 (NVMe Tiering) usage.


When it comes to understanding the actual health of an NVMe device used for NVMe Tiering, I was not sure whether looking at the SMART data was still the recommended approach or if there was a better way?

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Quick Tip: The Fastest Way to Clear Partitions for ESX Reinstallation

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I often redeploy my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) lab environment for a variety of reasons, from testing customer scenarios to testing the next version of our software. Because I have fully automated the ESX installation and configuration process in my lab, reinstalling ESX is a trivial task that takes less than 5 minutes from power-on to a fully configured system ready for VCF.

When reinstalling ESX, especially on systems configured with NVMe Tiering, vSAN, and local VMFS storage, the real challenge is clearing the existing partitions so the system is ready for a fresh installation. Traditionally, this can involve several manual steps and, in some cases, booting from a Linux live CD to remove stubborn partitions.

Given how frequently I redeploy my environment, I have developed the following workflow that consistently cleans up the various storage configurations without requiring a separate live CD environment. As I was performing yet another ESX reinstallation while writing this post, I realized I had never documented my workflow, so I thought I would share it in case it helps others.

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Quick Tip: Selective ESX Host Patching in VCF 9.1

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Prior to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, users could choose whether to apply an ESX update across all or a selected set of vSphere Clusters, but there was no additional granularity for selecting specific ESX hosts within a cluster. This has been a frequently requested capability, especially for excluding specific ESX hosts from an update or performing a controlled rollout across one or more vSphere Clusters.

Fleet Lifecycle Management in VCF 9.1 has been enhanced with a new custom host selection capability that allows users to select specific ESX hosts within a vSphere Cluster for patching.

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