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Maximizing vSAN ESA Performance on Minisforum MS-A2

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I have been running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 stack using the Minisforum MS-A2 in a three-node configuration for almost a year now. While the MS-A2 is not hardware that you would find on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), these units have been solid for my lab environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting my lab through its paces while testing various VCF.Next deployment and upgrade scenarios, and I began to notice the environment was sluggish, which was not something I had experienced before.

Long story short, after hours of debugging, including over the weekend with the amazing Nicholas Wilson, we were able to pinpoint one of the issues (more details at the end for the other issue) related to the onboard 10GbE SFP+ adapters. The MS-A2 uses an Intel x710, which apparently have been quite notorious when it comes to hardware offload. 😵‍💫

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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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Quick Tip - Improving thermals on Minisforum MS-A2

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If you own a Minisforums MS-A2, you may have noticed that the system can run quite warm under load. I certainly have been putting my MS-A2 to work by running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 and I have been trying various experiments in seeing how I can reduce both the thermals and thus the fan noise, which can get quite loud.

Even after applying the latest 1.0.2 MS-A2 Firmware, which now allows users to control the fan speeds, it did not help as the system was still running too hot. With extensive searching online, I was about to throw in the towel and thats when I came across Chris West's wiki page regarding a temperature fix and his extensive research on his MS-A2 (9955HX).

While Chris's MS-A2 is using the newer AMD Zen 5 processor, I figured it probably would apply to my MS-A2 (7945HX), which has the older AMD Zen 4 processor. I have used the workaround provided by Chris, please see his blog post for full details but by modifying the the TjMAX value from 0 to 78 (Advanced->AMD CBS->SMU Common Options->TjMAX), I have found that my MS-A2 have not been as warm as they were in the beginning.

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