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VCF 9.1 - OCuLink External Graphics (eGPU) Passthrough with vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)

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The Minisforum MS-A2 continues to be a popular and versatile platform for running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 in a lab environment. While the MS-A2 may be small in size, it is surprisingly capable and can even be configured to support an NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada (20GB VRAM) GPU, which I had used to deploy VMware Private AI Services (PAIS).

Although there are several half-height GPUs that can fit in an MS-A2, the overall selection remains relatively limited. For users looking for additional GPU flexibility, the MS-A2 supports an OCuLink half-height PCIe card, enabling the use of a much broader range of discrete GPUs.


Thanks to a fellow colleague who recently shared their success with me using this setup on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, including GPU passthrough to vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) cluster for AI experimentation, below are the specific BOM details for those interested.

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VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Uninstalling Optional Day-N Components

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There are a number of new capabilities in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 that can be deployed as Day-N operations after the initial VCF Fleet deployment, including:


If you need to uninstall one of these Day-N components, there is currently not a UI workflow within the VCF LCM UI. With that said, we do have a KB article that provides a clean up script that can also be used to uninstall these optional VCF components.

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VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Understanding VCF Installer Default Behavior for VCF Patch Releases

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With the first Expression Patch (9.1.0.0100) now available for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, I was wondering about version selection behavior (UI and API/JSON) within the VCF Installer.

The VCF Installer UI will automatically select the latest VCF release (e.g. 9.1.0) along with the latest available patch version for each VCF component (e.g. 9.1.0.0100). As shown in the screenshot below, not every component has an EP01 release, but the VCF Installer automatically selects the most recent version, which is exactly the behavior I would expect as a user.


If you need to override a specific component version, you can select from the available drop down.

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