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My VCF 9 Lab Mini-Rack

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Over the past few months, I have been documenting my journey in running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 in a lab environment, deploying a minimal setup while unlocking the full capabilities of the VCF Platform from fleet management, enabling modern workloads to running my own private AI Agents to just name a few!

Like many others, I had to review my physical hardware capabilities across compute, storage, and networking, which ultimately meant a new investment because my 10-year old Supermicro E200-8D could no longer keep up. 😅

For those interested in my VCF 9.0 build-of-materials (BOM), please refer to HERE and HERE for more information.

About a month back, I came across this YouTube video showcasing a super cool build fitting several Minisforums MS-01 (not the latest AMD MS-A2) into a mini-rack (10") form factor from DeskPi.

I really wish I had not seen this video 🤣... but since then, I have been researching and acquiring various parts to build my very own mini-rack for my VCF 9 setup!


Note: The power consumption is ~245w based on my workload usage/deployment.

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Quick Tip - vSphere Supervisor fails to complete due to vSAN Health Check Alerts

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I just re-deployed my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1 lab setup this evening, and after configuring configuring VCF Networking with VPC, I proceeded with vSphere Supervisor enablement using VPC. I had exported my previous vSphere Supervisor configuration to JSON, so the enablement should have been a no-op but as it was about to complete, I noticed there was this "Apply Solution" vCenter Server task that just kept failing with the following error message:

A general system error occurred: Health Check for 'esx03.vcf.lab' failed


I was really baffled by the error message and what health check was failing!?! I did know the Apply Solution typically would involve EAM (ESX Agent Manager), but I did not see anything out of the blue and I was in the process of filing an internal bug.

While I was waiting for the support bundles to generate and download, I figured I try searching for the keywords in our internal Google Chat in case someone had ran into error before. While there were few matches, there were no follow-ups or resolution. I was about to give up and then I saw a comment from Maher AlAsfar mentioning that if you use vSAN, make sure to silence all vSAN alerts as that is being checked by vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) as part of its healh check compliance!

Sure enough, I had two vSAN Health Check Alerts!


Once I silenced the vSAN alerts, the Apply Solution task completed immediately, and about a minute later, the vSphere Supervisor enablement also finished.

No ESX images available when upgrading from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.0 to 9.0.1

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1 is the latest maintenance release, incorporating a number of fixes but also including several nice enhancements such as the support for converging existing NSX environments with or with NSX Federation.

While VCF 9.0.1 has only been out for a few weeks, I have already seen a number of folks roll this out in their lab environment. For those that are new to VCF, I have seen several folks get stuck while going through the upgrade process from VCF 9.0.0 to VCF 9.0.1 when they reach the ESX portion of the upgrade, where they are asked to assign the matching vLCM image, but none are found as shown in the message below:

There are no images available that match the required target version to initiate the vLCM upgrade


Before VCF Operations can apply the ESX update, it requires a vLCM image that contains the desired ESX version (9.0.1) and since this is still a manual process of constructing the image as users might want additional components or vendor add-on, there are a couple of steps required before VCF Operations is made aware of the vLCM image which you will then be able to assign to vSphere Cluster.

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