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MS-A2 VCF 9.0 Lab: Installing VMware Private AI Services (PAIS)

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Over the past couple of months, I have used my minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 lab to explore nearly every major VCF 9.0 capability including NVMe Tiering, vSAN ESA, NSX VPC, vSphere Supervisor Services like vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), VM Service & ArgoCD, VCF Operations (VCFO), VCF Automation (VCFA), VMware AVI Load Balancer, Data Services Manager (DSM) and the list goes on and on! 😅

One area that I have been interested in diving deeper into is with our Private AI offerings and with the announcement of VMware Private AI Services (PAIS) now included as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), it gave me that additional motivation to see if I could also run PAIS in my lab!

As part of my exploration, I will be documenting my experience in a mini-blog series on installing and configuring PAIS to deploy an AI Agent using an NVIDIA GPU with DirectPath I/O. Since NVIDIA vGPU requires an NVIDIA AI for Enterprise (NVAIE) license, this approach can especially be useful for lab and learning purposes.

Requirements:

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Quick Tip - Custom JSON for Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with Custom TLS Certificates

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ESXi hosts deployed with a custom CA signed TLS certificate can be consumed by either VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x Cloud Builder or 9.x VCF Installer using a custom JSON deployment manifest.

An additional securitySpec should be appended to your VCF JSON deployment manifest using the following format:

"securitySpec": {
  "esxiCertsMode": "Custom",
  "rootCaCerts": [
    {
      "alias": "custom-CA",
      "certChain": [
        "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----\nMIIDqzC...\n...\n...==\n-----END CERTIFICATE-----"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

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My VCF 9 Lab Network Diagram

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During VMware Explore, I had a request from an attendee who was interested in my physical networking and how it is all connected for my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab setup. The network diagram below is based on the following VCF 9.0 Hardware BOM (Build-of-Material) and using the following network configuration with additional commentary on each connection in the write-up below.


Note: All green lines in the diagram above represent 10GbE network connectivity and all blue lines in the diagram above represent 2.5GbE network connectivity.

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