WilliamLam.com

Quick Tip - Updating Firmware on Minisforum MS-A2

by // 11 Comments

I recently had to setup a couple more Minisforum MS-A2 which will be used to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 for a special VMUG event at Broadcom's Palo Alto headquarters this week.

One of the first things I like to do with any new hardware system is to check the vendors website to make sure that I am running the latest firmware and drivers. I know many of you in the VMware Community have acquired the popular MS-A2 for VCF 9, so this is a good reminder to make sure your firmware is up to date!

My MS-A2 kits all shipped with the 1.0.1 version of the firmware and as of publishing this blog post, the latest version is 1.0.2. While reading the release notes for 1.0.2, I saw that one of the new feature is the ability to control the fan speeds, which was really the only negative feedback I had in my MS-A2 review, that fans were quite loud when any load was placed on the system.

Spoiler alert ... changing the fan speed to either balance and/or quiet did not make a difference 🤣 ... so YMMV with this new feature 😅

[Read more...]

Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0

by // 12 Comments

Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you may have seen a few blogs from me ?

To help folks digest all the resources for deploying and running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 in a lab environment, I have put this blog post together to summarize the various considerations and/or tweaks that will allow you to get the full experience of VCF 9.0 for non-production/commercial usage.

Make sure you to bookmark this page as I will continue to add new updates, I still have a number of backlog items to share ... but for now that will have to wait as I am in need of some PTO, which starts tomorrow! ?

[Read more...]

NVMe Tiering with Nested Virtualization in VCF 9.0

by // 4 Comments

The NVMe Tiering feature was first previewed with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and the feature is now officially supported with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0! ?

Since the original tech preview, all major limitations and unsupported workload profiles that would prevent an organization from deploying NVMe Tiering in production has been resolved as part of the VCF 9.0 release.

Although Nested Virtualization is NOT officially supported, many users rely on Nested ESXi for testing, development, and learning purposes. With that said, if you have NVMe Tiering enabled on an ESXi 9.0 host and you attempt to power on a Nested ESXi VM or VM that is configured with Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV), it will fail to power on with the following error message as shown in the screenshot below.


While it was possible to use Nested ESXi with the tech preview of NVMe Tiering, it was just not in scope as part of productizing NVMe Tiering for VCF 9.0.

All hope is not lost, while Nested Virtualization is still NOT officially supported by Broadcom, it is a very useful feature not just for our users but also for internal development purposes and after speaking with the tech lead for NVMe Tiering, this is something that will be addressed in a future update of VCF and this is just a short term limitation for now if you intend to run Nested ESXi workloads.