WilliamLam.com

Sharing a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering? 

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I am a huge fan of the new NVMe Tiering capability within vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and it has been fantastic to hear more users taking advantage of this new feature to see what it can do for their homelab/development setup but also for their various production workloads.

As of right now, enabling NVMe Tiering requires a dedicated NVMe device, which for a production system is probably acceptable as you will probably want to ensure there are no other workloads competing for IO on the NVMe device. However, for a development environment or homelab, this can be challenge due to number of available NVMe devices that can be used.

Thank you to fellow reader Andrea T, for sharing this awesome tidbit with the community and how you CAN actually share a single NVMe device with NVMe Tiering! 😍

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Homelab Hardware Options

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I have been getting a ton of inquiries lately, both internally as well as externally for hardware recommendations for building a new or updating an existing homelab/test environment to be able to deploy the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution. I typically receive at least half a dozen inquiries per week about general VMware Homelabs, but it has increased in volume lately, perhaps it was due to the recent US Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales or perhaps some are preparing for VCF 9 already?

In any case, I normally point users to my crowdsourced VMware Community Homelab Project, where users can submit their hardware build-of-materials (BOM), overall cost and the VMware solutions they are currently using.


While the VMware Community Homelab Project has been running for several years now and has helped numerous users, the majority of the submissions typically focus on subset of the VMware portfolio and only handful of submissions have included VCF and more importantly, some of the submissions are several years old.

Internally, a number of folks have shared more recent BOMs for building an environment to run the latest VCF 5.x release and I have also found several folks outside of VMware doing the same, so I thought it would be useful and timely to aggregate some of their hardware configurations to help give users an idea of what works and options as they are looking to revamp their lab going into 2025.

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Quick Tip - vSAN ESA Cluster Health Check returns Error message: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

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A fellow colleague was having some problems with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) CLI Installer when using the vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) bootstrap method, which automatically the configures vSAN ESA on a physical ESXi host before deploying the VCSA on top of the vSAN ESA Datastore.


Whether he manually downloaded the vSAN JSON HCL or generated his own custom vSAN ESA HCL, the VCSA Installer would fail with the following error:

Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

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