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Quick Tip - When using self-signed TLS Certificates with VCF Private AI Services (PAIS)

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Like many of our users, I was excited to hear that VMware Private AI Services (PAIS) will now be included as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), I already had some ideas brewing in my head and I definitely needed to get some hands on!

While setting up some of the requirements for PAIS, I ran into a couple of issues that revolved around the use of self-signed TLS certificates, which is probably common for many of  you, especially in a lab/proof of concept environment.

I spent good chunk of the day debugging the issues, which was not even the worse part, but it was the error messages that we saw. The error messages was not from the product code, but rather the underlying libraries that it relies upon and if you try to interpret the message as-is, you could go down a rabbit hole.

PAIS Engineering is already aware of the issues I ran into, so these will be enhanced in future updates but I did want to share the scenarios in case you run into them while deploying PAIS in your environment.

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Updated method for automatically joining vCenter Server using ESXi Kickstart

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Have you ever written a script that gets the job done and years later, you go back and ask yourself ... what the heck did I do or why did I do it that way!?! 😅

Probably not as frequent as we should but I have found myself in these situations over the years, whether it is addressing an issue/enhancement or needing to explain the code to another colleague.

While copious free time is never on our side in IT, it does help to re-evaluate your automation and processes over the years to see if there are new techniques, enhancements that can make the automation more effective.

I was recently CC'ed on a Reddit thread about some automation that I had worked on more than 14 years ago that would automatically join an ESXi host to vCenter Server using an ESXi Kickstart script.

Knowing what I know now and probably even earlier, the solution of calling into the vSphere MOB and manually crafting the XML payload to join the ESXi host to a desired vSphere Cluster in vCenter Server was certainly not ideal, but it got the job done. We can certainly improve the solution leveraging a more modern solution, while still staying true to the original requirements of being able to perform vSphere Cluster addition directly from ESXi 8.x/9.x Kickstart without relying on external dependencies.

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Enhancement in VCF 5.2.2 to bypass vSAN ESA HCL Check

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When vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) is selected as the primary storage for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x, the Cloud Builder Appliance will validate the system against the vSAN ESA HCL and will block the deployment if the hardware components are non-compliant.


For a production deployment, this should be the default experience but for non-production or proof-of-concept (POC), this can be annoying if you wish to accept the risk and proceed with using non-certified vSAN ESA hardware.

Today, the most viable workaround is to install the vSAN ESA Hardware Mock VIB , which will allow users to proceed with the deployment but it does require the additional installation step for each ESXi host.

Having spoken with VCF Engineering about this topic awhile back, they have introduced a nice enhancement with the latest release of VCF 5.2.2 that will allow users to easily bypass the vSAN ESA HCL check without requiring additional ESXi configurations changes.

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