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)
Where did 2024 go!? I can not believe there is only a few more months left before the end of the year!
During VMware Explore US, I had several folks ask whether I was going to publish a 2024 edition of my annual interesting VMware homelab kit blog post, simliar to HERE and HERE for 2023 and 2023 respectively. While I had planned for this originally, I was pretty busy this year and getting hands on with some of the latest Intel 14th Generation systems did not happen until much later and hence why I had not put anything together.
I was recently reminded of this request again and it feels like the right time to summarize the various kits that I have come across and/or have gotten hands on throughout the year.
There are also some interesting trends that I have observed in 2024, especially as it pertains to VMware Homelabs/Development/Testing purposes:
Starting with Intel Meteor Lake (14th Generation) CPUs, now part of the new Intel Core Ultra Processor (Series 1) brand, an integrated Neural Processing Unit or NPU is built right into the SoC (system-on-chip) and is optimized for low power AI Inferencing.
I found this article from Chips and Cheese about the new Intel Meteor Lake NPU to be super insightful, definitely recommend a read if you are new to NPUs.
While you can already consume the Intel integrated graphics (iGPU) in platforms like the Intel NUC with ESXi for workload inferencing, I was curious on whether this new Intel NPU could actually be used by ESXi? 🤔