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VCF 9.1 - New HTTP Offline Depot Support for VCF Installer & Fleet Depot Service

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VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 introduced the concept of a unified VCF Software Depot, which can connect to either Broadcom’s online repository or an offline depot that is hosted within an organizations environment.

By default, an offline VCF Software Depot requires HTTPS with basic authentication. In VCF 9.0, HTTPS can be disabled using this workaround, which remains applicable in VCF 9.1, however, basic authentication is still required.

Note: If you do not or can not  setup a basic web server for your VCF Offline Depot, you can use this simple Python script to serve up depot locally from your desktop as long as its accessible by VCF Installer and/or VCF Fleet Depot Service.

With VCF 9.1, both the VCF Installer and the new VCF Fleet Depot Service support an offline Software Depot configured with HTTP and no basic authentication. To take advantage of this capability, you must use the VCF Installer API for the initial VCF Fleet deployment, which automatically applies the same configuration to the Fleet Depot Service.

Note: The VCF 9.1 Installer UI currently does not support connecting to an offline VCF Software Depot using HTTP, the VCF Installer API must be used to apply this configuration.

If you accidentally used the VCF 9.0 workaround, you will need to reapply the HTTP configuration after the VCF Fleet has been deployed using the new VCF Fleet Depot Service API.

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AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling

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Happy Friday! 🥳

A couple of weeks back, Wenchao (creator of the Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) reached out to me to share an exciting development he had been working on.

Unlike traditional enterprise hardware, which typically includes an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) for exposing various hardware statistics, consumer systems like the popular Minisforum MS-A2 lack this capability out of the box.

Wenchao has developed a pseudo-IPMI driver for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 platforms that surfaces the CPU thermal and I am excited to share this will be released as a new Fling!


In addition to viewing this information via the vSphere UI, users can also retrieve the raw metrics via ESXCLI:

esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list


The driver currently supports the following:

  • ESX 9.1
  • ESX 9.0.x
  • ESX 8.0 Update 3

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Quick Tip: High CPU Utilization on ESX due to Slow Entropy from AMD Zen 4 CPUs

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I had been troubleshooting a stubborn CPU utilization issue with a workload that, over time would also overrun the CPU on my physical ESX host. The assumption was that the workload was causing the issue, but after several rounds of collecting various ESX performance statistics, there was nothing conclusive that the workload was the culprit.

An interesting observation from some of the ESXi VMkernel Engineering team was that my VMkernel log contained a large number entropy errors:

NRandomHwrng: 246: Out of entropy, refreshing

The engineering team suspected that these entropy issues could actually be the root cause of the issues I had observed, especially as they have seen something simliar in another case when entropy requests fail.

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