While I am a huge fan of the recent AMD Ryzen Zen4/Zen5-based consumer platforms, including the versatile Minisforum MS-A2, it is well known at this point that these processors can exhibit slower entropy generation, which can lead to significantly higher CPU utilization.
I have published a number of workarounds (HERE, HERE and HERE) to address higher-than-expected CPU utilization across different VCF components, but this has continued to feel like a game of whack-a-mole, with the same underlying entropy issue manifesting itself in different services and workloads.
Right before VMware Explore, I had also been testing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1.1 in my lab while finalizing my presentations and workshops for the conference. After deploying certain VCF components, I noticed that CPU utilization had increased significantly. Long story short, after an extensive debugging session with VCF Engineering, we traced the increased CPU utilization to RDSEED instruction requests originating from application space. The simplest solution turned out to be masking the RDSEED instruction from the guest operating systems!
