WilliamLam.com

VCF 9.0 Hardware BOM for Silicon Valley VMUG

by // 2 Comments

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!

[Read more...]

Clearing resource locks with VCF 9.0 Installer

by // Leave a Comment

While deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Fleet, I had observed the VCF Installer task for checking the deployment status for VCF Automation (VCFA) had taken longer than expected and it eventually failed to complete.


While the deployment of VCFA will take some time, especially if you are using consumer grade hardware like I was, I was actually monitoring the granular progress within VCF Operations (VCFO) under Fleet Management->Lifecycle->VCF Management->Tasks and you should see an active task labeled VCF Automation which is representing the deployment of VCFA.

Perhaps it was my impatience ... but I had noticed the VCFA task had already completed but the VCF Installer still did not progress further after waiting maybe 10-15 minutes.

I had the (not so) brilliant idea of attempting to force a re-check of the task by simply rebooting the VCF Installer ...

[Read more...]

Workaround for single NIC using NFS storage with VCF 9.0

by // Leave a Comment

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 brings additional flexibility by supporting multiple types of principal storage: vSAN (OSA/ESA), Fibre Channel & NFS v3 that users can now choose from.


Right before heading out for PTO a couple of weeks ago I was experimenting with NFS as my principal storage for deploying my initial VCF 9 Fleet with a Minisforums MS-A2 system. While the MS-A2 does have multiple network adapters that are supported with ESXi 9.0, I only had the ethernet NIC connected.

While a single NIC can be used to deploy VCF 9.0, especially when using vSAN as the principal storage. However, in my testing with NFS and a single NIC, the migration from Virtual Standard Switch (VSS) to Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS) ran into some issues.

Note: When using NFS as your principal storage, the NFS network must reside in its own dedicated VLAN (e.g. can not be shared with the ESXi Management Network)

[Read more...]