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Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab Setup

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I have been a huge fan of using the Minisforum MS-A2 to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, which has been a fantastic way to get hands-on experience with the latest release of VCF!

Best of all, it allows us to explore all the exciting new capabilities that VCF 9 has to offer, while balancing the required resources for a minimal footprint deployment!


Over the past couple of months, I have been performing extensive testing and validation of VCF 9 running on the MS-A2 and I have documented the full installation process that users can follow along in this Github repository:

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Custom UEFI Boot Menu for ESXi 9.0 using rEFInd

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Unless I am working with an unreleased version of ESXi, I usually install it by booting from a USB drive that includes an embedded Kickstart configuration file, that will fully automate the installation.

For a single ESXi host deployment, this workflow works great but if you have more than one host with different ESXi Kickstart configuration files, you will either need multiple USB drives or you have to keep updating the embedded Kickstart file reference using a single USB device.

There are a number of different ways to solve this problem, I have covered many of the solutions in my Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation at Scale session at VMware Explore.

With that said, since I have been deploying several Minisforum MS-A2 for use with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9, I wanted to explore a solution that had been requested in the past but I never had the time to look into, which is creating a custom ESXi boot menu that would allow you to select specific ESXi version and/or kickstart configuration files.

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Quick Tip - Disable ESX Live Patching enforcement to enable vSphere Supervisor

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While enabling the vSphere Supervisor on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 setup, I came across an error I had not seen before as I have performed this numerous times across both vSphere 8.x and vSphere 9.0:

A general system error occurred: Solution specification in the image are incompatible with hosts 'esx02.vcf.lab, esx01.vcf.lab'


I was going through various vCenter Server logs files, but was not able to find anything useful and the strangest part was the vSphere Supervisor Service was already up and running but something about incompatibility and image.

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