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Search Results for: guest operations

Quick Tip: Reducing High CPU Utilization on NSX due to slow Entropy from AMD Zen4/5 CPUs

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AMD Zen4/Zen5 processors have been known to have slower entropy generation, which can lead to higher CPU utilization for workloads that depend on random number generation. I recently learned from a colleague (Ross Wynne) about a simple optimization for NSX Manager that can significantly reduce CPU utilization when running on AMD Zen4/Zen5 processors.

Shut down your NSX Manager VM and add the following VM Advanced Setting. This allows the guest operating system to retrieve entropy directly from the ESXi host, which already includes optimizations for entropy generation on AMD Zen4 and Zen5 processors.

isolation.tools.getEntropy.disable = FALSE


Note: Ensure you have applied the recommended entropySource configuration for your physical ESX host in addition to this configuration change.

In my limited testing, I have observed the NSX Manager load average drop to less than 5, whereas it was consistently much higher before applying this optimization. I will continue to monitor my environment, but this is definitely a worthwhile optimization to add to your VCF homelab toolkit. This configuration change can also benefit NSX Edge and NSX Virtual Network Appliances (VNA).

How many VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Instances can a VCF Fleet support?

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With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a new architectural construct has been introduced called a VCF Fleet. This brings centralized fleet management and provides modern workload consumption across multiple VCF instances, all managed through a single deployment of VCF Automation and VCF Operations, as shown in the diagram below.


A common question that has been coming up quite a bit lately is how many VCF Instances can a VCF Fleet support?

Technically, there is not a fixed number of  VCF Instances that can be managed by VCF Operations. As with with most things in our industry, the answer is "it depends" ...

Before we take a closer look at what "it depends" actually means, it is important to understand what is a VCF Instance?


A VCF Instance includes a VCF Management Domain and can include one or more VCF Workload Domains.

  • VCF Management Domain includes the core SDDC components: vCenter Server, ESXi hosts, vSAN or other supported principal storage and NSX Manager) along with single instance of SDDC Manager and a VCF Operations collector.
    • SDDC Manager provides lifecycle management for all deployed core SDDC components within a VCF Instance
    • VCF Operations Collector provides inventory and metric collection within a VCF Instances, which is then sent to VCF Operations
  • VCF Workload Domain, when deployed only includes the core SDDC components and all lifecycle management and operations is performed by the single instance of SDDC Manager

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Frequently asked scenarios about VM Provisioning & Management for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+

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This is a multi-part blog series on some of the frequently asked questions and scenarios for the vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ Cloud Services. What started out as a single blog post that attempted to summarize some of the learnings and notes that I have made while answering various questions from our field and customers for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ quickly turned into a 3K+ word blog post and counting! ?

While I thought it would be easier from a search perspective to have everything in a single blog post, I decided to take the advice from the community and actually break it up into small blogs which would be part of a large multi-part blog series, in no particular order but I recommend reading it in the following logical order as shown below:

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