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PowerCLI remediation script for running NSX Edge on AMD Ryzen for VCF 9.0

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If you are planning to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 on an AMD Ryzen processor (consumer CPU), make sure you are aware of the required workaround to get the NSX Edge node to function properly, which I had shared the solution back in 2020.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the workaround is still applicable with VCF 9.0 due to lack of support for Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) with Ryzen processors. One of the challenges you could face depending on where you deploy the NSX Edge, since there is a new workflow that is built right into vCenter Server 9.0 and SSH is not enabled by default, which means you would need to go to VM Console of the NSX Edge VM to apply the workaround.


To make this even less fun, during this time the NSX Edge is going through its initialization process and because it fails to detect DPDK support, the required NSX services can not start and keeps re-trying which is not a bad thing. The reason the looping is a problem is because the workaround requires editing a configuration file and depending on how fast you can type, the initialization process will restart and cause your session to end and you now need to log back in, thus causing a less than ideal experience.

As you can probably guess, I got hit by this re-initialization loop and I just got tired of trying to be faster than the computer ?

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Quick Tip - Using PowerCLI to query VMware Tools Configuration at scale 

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One of the most powerful and versatile VM management capability in vSphere is the Guest Operations API, providing a rich set of operations from transferring files to/from the guest to running commands directly on the guest as if you were logged in!

An easy way to consume the Guest Operations API is via PowerCLI and using the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet, which I have extensively written about, showcasing all the creative ways this can be used to solve various automation challenges.

I recently came across a Reddit thread where the OP wanted to check to query for a specific VMware Tools configuration as part of the vSphere Security Configuration Guide and was looking for some help as logging into each and every system did not seem like a good idea, which it is NOT! 🙂

Any time you have a use case where you need to scale a specific operation (reading or writing) a change, you should consider Guest Operations API, you can easily use a single API to perform this operation at scale!

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Automating Workload Management on vSphere with Tanzu

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As promised, here is the complimentary solution to my existing Automated vSphere with Tanzu Lab Deployment Script, which will automatically deploy and configure the required infrastructure (vCenter Server Appliance, ESXi, vSAN and HAProxy VMs) so that you can quickly jump to enabling Workload Management on your vSphere Cluster.

FYI: Ben Corrie, one of the Engineers on the vSphere with Tanzu team recently published a vSphere with Tanzu 4-Part Deep Dive video series where he walks you through in deploying everything from scratch along with the concepts that should help you better understand how vSphere with Tanzu works. He is actually doing this in his own personal homelab and thought this might be useful to share with others. Kudos Ben and highly recommend folks check out his video if you new to vSphere with Tanzu and Kubernetes.


Enabling Workload Management is a manual step after the automated deployment script and as you know, I prefer to automate as much as I can. I have updated my existing PowerCLI Workload Management Module to now also support the new vSphere with Tanzu capability using HAProxy for networking instead of NSX-T. The module can be downloaded from PowerShell Gallery by simply running

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