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VCF 9.1 - Quick Tip: Optimized Workflow for Configuring Distributed Transit Gateway (DTGW) with NSX Virtual Network Appliance (VNA)

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With VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1, the Distributed Transit Gateway (DTGW) connectivity model now supports NSX stateful network services through the Virtual Network Appliance (VNA) cluster. This makes it easy for VI Admins to provision Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), which can then be used to deploy vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) workloads using either vCenter Server or VCF Automation (VCFA).

One of the most underappreciated benefits is the ability to complete various NSX workflows including an entire VNA cluster deployment and DTGW configuration directly from vCenter Server, without having to switch to the NSX Manager UI. While NSX Manager still provides the underlying micro-frontend interfaces that are integrated into the vSphere UI, I appreciate having the flexibility to perform these workflows from either the vCenter Server or NSX Manager interface, depending on your roles and responsibilities within an organization.

While there are a number of community blog posts covering DTGW and VNA deployments, they typically start in the vSphere UI for the initial VNA deployment before switching to the NSX Manager UI to complete the remaining configuration, which is perfectly valid. Personally, I prefer using the vSphere UI for as many workflows as possible, especially since enabling vSphere Supervisor and vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) is also performed through the vSphere UI.

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Quick Tip: How to Identify Which Kubernetes Cluster Owns a vSphere Container Volume (PV)

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I was recently cleaning up some orphaned vSphere Container Volumes and while I was able to compare the Persistent Volumes (PV) IDs against the ones currently in use by a couple of Kubernetes clusters, I wanted to be 100% sure before removing them, especially since I planned bulk delete using PowerCLI’s Remove-CnsVolume cmdlet.

You can view all provisioned vSphere Container Volumes in the vSphere UI by navigating to vSphere Cluster->Monitor->Cloud Native Storage->Container Volumes. In addition to the volume details, you also get access to all of the associated metadata and labels, very similar to what you would see using kubectl, which is quite nice!


While reviewing the PV IDs in the UI, I noticed an attribute named Kubernetes Cluster, which appeared to identify the Kubernetes (K8s) cluster that owned the volume. How do I find this Kubernetes Cluster ID?

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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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