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Import vCenter Server with Single ESX Host as new VCF Workload Domain?

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A useful feature in VCF Operations 9.0 is the ability to create a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Workload Domain from an existing vSphere environment, providing seamless onboarding into a VCF Fleet and getting access to the new VCF Fleet Management capabilities.

To access the VCF Import feature, navigate to the inventory view of your VCF Instance within VCF Operations and select Add Workload Domain->Import a vCenter Server to begin the workflow. A variety of deployment configurations are supported with VCF Import, you can refer to the official documentation for the complete list of requirement and minimum versions.

Deploying VCF 9.0 in a lab environment is an easy way to get hands on experience with this workflow. I recently installed ESX 9.0.1 onto a single ASUS NUC 15 Pro with a self managing vCenter Server for trying out the import scenario but I ran into the following pre-check error: Please ensure there is at least one cluster has more than 1 host


I guess I need to have more than one ESX host before I can proceed ... or do I? 🤔

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Modding an NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada (20GB VRAM) into Minisforum MS-A2

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The Minisforum MS-A2 has been my go to platform for running an optimized and fully functional VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 lab environment. From vSAN ESA to NSX VPC to vSphere Kubernetes Service to VCF Automation to Data Services Manager, it runs it all!

Over the past couple of weeks, I had also been experimenting with running VMware Private AI Services (PAIS) using the MS-A2. For those with an eye for detail, may have noticed that the NVIDIA GPU requirement was actually being satisfied by an ASUS NUC 14 Performance, which includes an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 (8GB VRAM). The ASUS NUC was purely for validation and prototyping purposes to ensure that I could actually run PAIS before investing in a more capable and certainly more expensive NVIDIA GPU 🤑

One of the lesser known capabilities of the MS-A2 is the ability to add a half-height PCIe device and from the very beginning when I had first heard about the MS-A2, my plan and hope was to be able to add an NVIDIA GPU to the system!

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MS-A2 VCF 9.0 Lab: Deploying Model Endpoint with DirectPath I/O using VMware for Private AI Services (PAIS)

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In this final blog post, we will now deploy several AI model endpoints (downloaded from Hugging Face), configure our private data source which can be a shared location (Google Drive, Confluence, Microsoft Sharepoint, or S3-compatible endpoint) or using local files and then consuming them using an AI Agent that is built using VMware for Private AI Services (PAIS).

As mentioned in the very first blog post of this mini-series, my goal was to get hands experience with PAIS but without the need to have an NVIDIA GPU capable of vGPU, which would also require an NVIDIA AI for Enterprise (NVAIE) license.

Luckily, we can use an NVIDIA GPU via DirectPath I/O, thanks to the backend plumbing the PAIS Engineering team have built and had shared with me 😊

For my proof of concept, I am using an ASUS NUC 14 Performance, which has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 mobile GPU (8GB VRAM). The ASUS NUC 14 is running alongside my Minisforum MS-A2 setup, is only used to deploy the completions model endpoint. The use of the ASUS NUC 14 is purely for prototyping and experimentation purposes to demonstrate that anyone can play with PAIS within their lab environment. I plan to use a more powerful NVIDIA GPU setup, which I will share more details at a later point for those interested.

References:

Requirements:

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