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Useful M.2 NVMe accessories for vSphere (VSAN/VMFS) Home Labs

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I recently acquired a new toy for the home lab thanks to Timo Sugliani who shared an article on Twitter a few weeks back for a new USB-based enclosure that supports an NVMe SSD device using the M.2 form factor.

I was excited to give the accessory a try, especially as the M.2 devices are used regularly for  vSphere home labs running on either the Intel NUCs or Supermicro E200-8D. Most of these platforms only support a single M.2 slot and this is an easy way to add additional high performance storage capacity with a small footprint. The other benefit with an external enclosure is that you now have a portable and reliable storage solution that can easily be moved from system to system, especially for those that have asked about running VMFS on USB-based device.

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Automated Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Lab Deployment 

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While working on my Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blog series awhile back, one of the things I was also working on was some automation to help build out the required infrastructure NSX-T (Manager, Controller & Edge), Nested ESXi hosts configured with VSAN for the Compute vSphere Cluster and Pivotal Ops Manager. This was not only useful for my own learning purposes, but that I could easily rebuild my lab if I had messed something up and allowed me to focus more on the PKS solution rather than standing up the infrastructure itself.

To be honest, I had about 95% of the script done but I was not able to figure out one of the NSX-T APIs and I got busy and had left the script on the back burner. This past weekend while cleaning out some of my PKS research documents, I came across the script and funny enough, in about 30minutes I was able to solve the problem which I was stuck for weeks prior. I just finished putting the final touches on the script along with adding some documentation. Simliar to my other vGhetto Lab Automation scripts, I have created a Github repo vGhetto Automated PKS Lab Deployment

UPDATE (06/19/18) - I have just updated the script to also include the deployment and configuration of the PKS components (Ops Manager, BOSH Director, Harbor & Stemcell). The script by default will now configure everything end-2-end and you will have a fully functional PKS environment that you can start playing around with. For complete details, please see the Github repo which has the updated requirements and documentation. Below is a screenshot of the PKS deployment and configuration which requires the use of the Ops Manager CLI (OM).


The script will deploy the following components which will be placed inside of a vApp as shown in the screenshot below:

  • NSX-T Manager
  • NSX-T Controller x 3 (though you technically only need one for lab/poc purposes)
  • NSX-T Edge
  • Nested ESXi VMs x 3 (VSAN will be configured)
  • Ops Manager


The script follows my PKS blog series and automates Part 3 (NSX-T) and the start of Part 4 (Ops Manager deploy), please refer to these individual blog posts for more information. The goal of the script is to enable folks to jump right into the PKS configuration workflows and not have to worry about setting up the actual infrastructure that is needed for PKS. Once the script has finished, you can jump right into Ops Manager and start your PKS journey.

Here is a sample execution of the script which took ~29 minutes to complete.


The full requirements for using the script be found on the Github repo and below are the software versions that I had used to deploy and configure PKS:

How to simulate Persistent Memory (PMem) in vSphere 6.7 for educational purposes? 

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A really cool new capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.7 is the support for the extremely fast memory technology known as non-volatile memory (NVM), also known as persistent memory (PMem). Customers can now benefit from the high data transfer rate of volatile memory with the persistence and resiliency of traditional storage. As of this blog post, both Dell and HP have Persistent Memory support and you can see the list of supported devices and systems here and here.


PMem can be consumed in one of two methods:

  • Virtual PMem (vPMem) - In this mode, the GuestOS is actually PMem-aware and can consume the physical PMem device on the ESXi host as standard, byte-addressable memory. In addition to using an OS that supports PMem, you will also need to ensure that the VM is running the latest Virtual Hardware 14
  • Virtual PMem Disks (vPMemDisk) - In this mode, the GuestOS is NOT PMem-aware and does not have access to the physical PMem device. Instead, a new virtual PMem hard disk can be created and attached to a VM. To ensure the PMem hard disk is placed on the PMem Datastore as part of this workflow, a new PMem VM Storage Policy will be applied automatically. There are no additional GuestOS or VM Virtual Hardware requirement for this scenario, this is great for legacy OS that are not PMem-aware

Customers who may want to familiarize themselves with these new PMem workflows, especially for Automation or educational purposes, could definitely benefit from the ability to simulate PMem in their vSphere environment prior to obtaining a physical PMem device. Fortunately, this is something you can actually do if you have some additional spare memory from your physical ESXi host.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Unlike a real physical PMem device where your data will be persisted upon a reboot, the simulated method will NOT persist your data. Please use this at your own risk and do not place important or critical VMs using this method.

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