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VCF 9.1 - Comprehensive ESX Configuration Workarounds for Lab Deployments

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With the announcement of VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, I know many of you are eager to start planning for 9.1 and get it into your lab environment for hands-on experience as the first step toward pre-production validation.

Unless you are among the few with adequate resources, including servers listed on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), most lab environments are resource constrained in one way or another.

To help expedite your 9.1 deployment for non-production usage, I have documented the various ESX configuration workarounds that can used for lab deployments, especially for functional testing and/or for educational purpose.

I will continue to update this page with new information, so be sure to bookmark for your single reference!

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AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling

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Happy Friday! 🥳

A couple of weeks back, Wenchao (creator of the Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) reached out to me to share an exciting development he had been working on.

Unlike traditional enterprise hardware, which typically includes an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) for exposing various hardware statistics, consumer systems like the popular Minisforum MS-A2 lack this capability out of the box.

Wenchao has developed a pseudo-IPMI driver for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 platforms that surfaces the CPU thermal and I am excited to share this will be released as a new Fling!


In addition to viewing this information via the vSphere UI, users can also retrieve the raw metrics via ESXCLI:

esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list


The driver currently supports the following:

  • ESX 9.1
  • ESX 9.0.x
  • ESX 8.0 Update 3

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Quick Tip: High CPU Utilization on ESX due to Slow Entropy from AMD Zen 4 CPUs

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I had been troubleshooting a stubborn CPU utilization issue with a workload that, over time would also overrun the CPU on my physical ESX host. The assumption was that the workload was causing the issue, but after several rounds of collecting various ESX performance statistics, there was nothing conclusive that the workload was the culprit.

An interesting observation from some of the ESXi VMkernel Engineering team was that my VMkernel log contained a large number entropy errors:

NRandomHwrng: 246: Out of entropy, refreshing

The engineering team suspected that these entropy issues could actually be the root cause of the issues I had observed, especially as they have seen something simliar in another case when entropy requests fail.

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