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Quick Tip: High CPU Utilization on ESX due to Slow Entropy from AMD Zen 4 CPUs

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I had been troubleshooting a stubborn CPU utilization issue with a workload that, over time would also overrun the CPU on my physical ESX host. The assumption was that the workload was causing the issue, but after several rounds of collecting various ESX performance statistics, there was nothing conclusive that the workload was the culprit.

An interesting observation from some of the ESXi VMkernel Engineering team was that my VMkernel log contained a large number entropy errors:

NRandomHwrng: 246: Out of entropy, refreshing

The engineering team suspected that these entropy issues could actually be the root cause of the issues I had observed, especially as they have seen something simliar in another case when entropy requests fail.

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vSAN ESA Disk & HCL workaround for VCF 9.0

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vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) has become the preferred architecture when deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those interested in exploring vSAN ESA with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 but may not have compatible hardware from the vSAN ESA HCL, there are a couple of workarounds that you might want to be aware of.

UPDATE (09/29/25) - As of VCF 9.0.1, you no longer need to deploy the vSAN ESA Hardware Mock VIB, please see this blog post for more details which will allow you to easily bypass this check directly within the VCF Installer.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk. For production deployments, you should be using supported vSAN ESA Hardware which you can refer to Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

There are potentially two scenarios you may come across when using vSAN ESA to deploy your initial and/or extending your VCF Fleet.

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ESX Server 1.0 - Trip down memory lane

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I recently had a bit of VMware Nostalgia and for the past several weeks, I have been working on a personal skunk works project in trying to locate all major ESX and ESXi releases over the past 22 years including ESX Server 1.0 which was released by VMware back in 2001!

To my surprise, finding a digital copy of ESX pre-2.0 (1.0 & 1.5) was much harder than I had expected. Back in those early days, software was not commonly distributed over the internet like it is today, instead it was sent to vendors to create physical CD/DVD discs, which was then shipped to customers and partners. I had also reached out to many tenured folks at VMware who were still around from the early days, but each response lead to another set of folks and it typically either went in a circle or to a dead end. This was turning into an archeological hunt.

I decided to give it one more shot and I pinged John Arrasjid aka VCDX #1 and after a bit of searching, John actually found a pristine copy of ESX Server 1.0, still sealed in the box! Given how difficult it was to locate a 1.0 copy of ESX, we thought it was worth opening up and to preserve this VMware history by creating a digital ISO image, so that I could then share the experience of installing ESX 1.0 with the broader VMware community.

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