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Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Lab Setup

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I have been a huge fan of using the Minisforum MS-A2 to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, which has been a fantastic way to get hands-on experience with the latest release of VCF!

Best of all, it allows us to explore all the exciting new capabilities that VCF 9 has to offer, while balancing the required resources for a minimal footprint deployment!


Over the past couple of months, I have been performing extensive testing and validation of VCF 9 running on the MS-A2 and I have documented the full installation process that users can follow along in this Github repository:

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VCF 9.0 Hardware BOM for Silicon Valley VMUG

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I recently participated in a special VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 event at the Silicon Valley VMUG, which was held at the Broadcom headquarters in Palo Alto, California.


I had a fantastic time at the event, lots of great engagement from attendees, kudos to Frances Wong and the entire VMUG team for putting the event together!

With the huge amount of interests from the community in running VCF 9, I thought this would be a great event to showcase a VCF 9 lab setup using the popular Minisforum MS-A2. The exact same VCF 9 lab setup will also be used for the upcoming VMware {Code} Hackathon at VMware Explore, so definitely sign up if you are interested in playing with the MS-A2 at Explore!

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Quick Tip - Updating Firmware on Minisforum MS-A2

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I recently had to setup a couple more Minisforum MS-A2 which will be used to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 for a special VMUG event at Broadcom's Palo Alto headquarters this week.

One of the first things I like to do with any new hardware system is to check the vendors website to make sure that I am running the latest firmware and drivers. I know many of you in the VMware Community have acquired the popular MS-A2 for VCF 9, so this is a good reminder to make sure your firmware is up to date!

My MS-A2 kits all shipped with the 1.0.1 version of the firmware and as of publishing this blog post, the latest version is 1.0.2. While reading the release notes for 1.0.2, I saw that one of the new feature is the ability to control the fan speeds, which was really the only negative feedback I had in my MS-A2 review, that fans were quite loud when any load was placed on the system.

Spoiler alert ... changing the fan speed to either balance and/or quiet did not make a difference 🤣 ... so YMMV with this new feature 😅

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