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Workaround for single NIC using NFS storage with VCF 9.0

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 brings additional flexibility by supporting multiple types of principal storage: vSAN (OSA/ESA), Fibre Channel & NFS v3 that users can now choose from.


Right before heading out for PTO a couple of weeks ago I was experimenting with NFS as my principal storage for deploying my initial VCF 9 Fleet with a Minisforums MS-A2 system. While the MS-A2 does have multiple network adapters that are supported with ESXi 9.0, I only had the ethernet NIC connected.

While a single NIC can be used to deploy VCF 9.0, especially when using vSAN as the principal storage. However, in my testing with NFS and a single NIC, the migration from Virtual Standard Switch (VSS) to Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) ran into some issues.

Note: When using NFS as your principal storage, the NFS network must reside in its own dedicated VLAN (e.g. can not be shared with the ESXi Management Network)

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Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0

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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! ?

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on ASUS NUC 15 Pro (Cyber Canyon)

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With the release of ASUS’s 15th Generation NUCs powered by Intel’s new Core Ultra 2 processors (codenamed Arrow Lake), Intel has made yet another architectural change by dropping the long-standing Hyper-Threading feature from the Performance cores (P-cores), first introduced over two decades ago.


While the verdict is still out regarding this change, I was able to get hands on with an ASUS NUC 15 Pro (formally known as Cyber Canyon) to see what impacts it might have for running ESXi and even VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), since that has been a frequent question from many since VCF 9.0 went GA last week.

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