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Single Node VMware Avi Load Balancer with VCF 9.0

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 continues to support one of the most popular and powerful load balancer, VMware Avi Load Balancer. When you deploy a new VMware Avi Load Balancer within a given VCF Domain, by default SDDC Manager will deploy three VMware Avi Controllers for high availability purposes.

For lab purposes, you may not need all three VMware Avi Controllers but there was no way to change the system default in earlier releases of VCF. With VCF 9.0, we now have way to deploy just a single VMware Avi Controller, which is fantastic for lab and testing purposes.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, use only within a lab environment.

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Initial Mikrotik router/switch configuration for VCF 9.0

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While a capable system like the Minisforum MS-A2 (see example BOM) is great for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 in a lab, equally capable networking hardware is just as essential.

Depending on your requirements, there are a TON of networking options in the market from low-end enterprise to prosumer hardware. One popular brand of router/switches that I have seen many folks from the VMware community deploy is from MikroTik.


RouterOS, MikroTik's operating system that runs across all their devices, provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality, which is especially useful for a VCF lab environment.

My initial experience with some of MikroTik's consumer router/switches was not great as I did not realize Jumbo Frame support (MTU of 9000) was not a standard feature and while you can go larger than 1500 bytes on some devices, it was no where near the 9K that I was looking for.

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Applying 1st ESX Live Patch using VCF 9.0 Operations

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A new ESX 9.0.0.0100 patch was recently released to address CVE-2025-41237 and best of all, it is live patchable!

As shared in this blog post from Féidhlim O'Leary, the ESX Live Patching capability has been significantly enhanced with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 and while you can use live patching capability from within vCenter Server, I wanted to roll this out using the new Lifecycle Fleet Management capability in VCF Operations 😎

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