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MS-A2 VCF 9.0 Lab: Installing VMware Private AI Services (PAIS)

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Over the past couple of months, I have used my minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 lab to explore nearly every major VCF 9.0 capability including NVMe Tiering, vSAN ESA, NSX VPC, vSphere Supervisor Services like vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), VM Service & ArgoCD, VCF Operations (VCFO), VCF Automation (VCFA), VMware AVI Load Balancer, Data Services Manager (DSM) and the list goes on and on! 😅

One area that I have been interested in diving deeper into is with our Private AI offerings and with the announcement of VMware Private AI Services (PAIS) now included as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), it gave me that additional motivation to see if I could also run PAIS in my lab!

As part of my exploration, I will be documenting my experience in a mini-blog series on installing and configuring PAIS to deploy an AI Agent using an NVIDIA GPU with DirectPath I/O. Since NVIDIA vGPU requires an NVIDIA AI for Enterprise (NVAIE) license, this approach can especially be useful for lab and learning purposes.

Requirements:

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Quick Tip - Custom JSON for Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with Custom TLS Certificates

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ESXi hosts deployed with a custom CA signed TLS certificate can be consumed by either VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x Cloud Builder or 9.x VCF Installer using a custom JSON deployment manifest.

An additional securitySpec should be appended to your VCF JSON deployment manifest using the following format:

"securitySpec": {
  "esxiCertsMode": "Custom",
  "rootCaCerts": [
    {
      "alias": "custom-CA",
      "certChain": [
        "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----\nMIIDqzC...\n...\n...==\n-----END CERTIFICATE-----"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

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Automating VCF 9.0 Operations License Registration & Import for Air-Gapped Environments

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License management for both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 is now handled by VCF Operations, which supports keyless entitlement in both Connected and Disconnected modes.


While Connected mode in VCF Operations offers the simplest user experience for licensing, many customers may opt for the Disconnected mode for a number of reasons.

The two high level workflows for the Disconnected mode in VCF Operations consists of the following:

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