WilliamLam.com

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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Maximizing vSAN ESA Performance on Minisforum MS-A2

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I have been running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 stack using the Minisforum MS-A2 in a three-node configuration for almost a year now. While the MS-A2 is not hardware that you would find on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), these units have been solid for my lab environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting my lab through its paces while testing various VCF.Next deployment and upgrade scenarios, and I began to notice the environment was sluggish, which was not something I had experienced before.

Long story short, after hours of debugging, including over the weekend with the amazing Nicholas Wilson, we were able to pinpoint one of the issues (more details at the end for the other issue) related to the onboard 10GbE SFP+ adapters. The MS-A2 uses an Intel x710, which apparently have been quite notorious when it comes to hardware offload. 😵‍💫

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USB Native Network Driver for ESXi supports Realtek RTL8157 & RTL8156BG

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In response to community feedback, we are excited to announce an update to the popular USB Native Network Driver for ESXi Fling . This release is currently available for ESXi 8.0 Update 3 and adds support for the latest Realtek USB devices: RTL8157 (5GbE) & RTL8156BG (2.5GbE), bringing the total number of supported chipsets to over 25+. A similar update is also planned for ESX 9.0, which will be published hopefully in the next few weeks.

Several of you have asked about specific models compatible with the latest Realtek chipset. Below are the two I am currently using for testing, which you can find the links below. If you have other recommendations that work, feel free to share them in the comments.

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