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VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Upgrading ESX Hosts with Non-Certified vSAN ESA NVMe Devices in SDDC Manager

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I recently started rolling out the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 Express Patch 1 (9.1.0.0100) into my lab environment, and everything had been going quite smoothly. After successfully upgrading vCenter Server and NSX earlier this morning, I moved on to my ESX hosts. Since I always run the pre-checks before kicking off an upgrade, I immediately noticed the following error message, which prevented me from proceeding further within SDDC Manager:

vSAN health test 'NVMe device is VMware certified' reported an issue for cluster 'VCF-Mgmt-Cluster'. Detailed error message: The NVMe device is not listed in the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG).


I immediately recognized the error message and the solution, especially having spent far too much time experimenting with NVMe devices that are NOT on the vSAN ESA BCG in my lab environment. 😅

Note: This workaround is NOT required if you are using supported NVMe devices for vSAN ESA

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Maximizing vSAN ESA Performance on Minisforum MS-A2

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I have been running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 stack using the Minisforum MS-A2 in a three-node configuration for almost a year now. While the MS-A2 is not hardware that you would find on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), these units have been solid for my lab environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting my lab through its paces while testing various VCF.Next deployment and upgrade scenarios, and I began to notice the environment was sluggish, which was not something I had experienced before.

Long story short, after hours of debugging, including over the weekend with the amazing Nicholas Wilson, we were able to pinpoint one of the issues (more details at the end for the other issue) related to the onboard 10GbE SFP+ adapters. The MS-A2 uses an Intel x710, which apparently have been quite notorious when it comes to hardware offload. 😵‍💫

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Retrieving the vSAN Cluster Shutdown VMs running Pre-Check Results using PowerCLI

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The vSAN Cluster Shutdown capability has been around since vSAN 7 Update 3 and has been enhanced over the years, most recently with the introduction of a vSAN Cluster Shutdown Wizard as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 release.


For those looking to automate the shutdown of their vSAN Cluster, we have a number of PowerCLI cmdlets: Get-VsanClusterPowerState, Start-VsanCluster and Stop-VsanCluster that simplifies this process in addition to the new UI interface, all leveraging the vSAN Management APIs.

Before the vSAN Cluster can initiate the shutdown workflow, it needs to make sure all VMs (excluding the vCenter Server VM that is managing the vSAN Cluster) has been powered off. For large environments, it can take some time to power off all VMs, which means you might need to poll or wait before running the Stop-VsanCluster cmdlet.

Instead of having to write additional code to wait for all your VMs to shutdown, you can leverage one of the vSAN Health Check Perspectives that will conveniently let you know when the vSAN Cluster is ready to be shutdown.

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