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MS-A2 VCF 9.0 Lab: Installing VMware Private AI Services (PAIS)

09.24.2025 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of months, I have used my minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 lab to explore nearly every major VCF 9.0 capability including NVMe Tiering, vSAN ESA, NSX VPC, vSphere Supervisor Services like vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS), VM Service & ArgoCD, VCF Operations (VCFO), VCF Automation (VCFA), VMware AVI Load Balancer, Data Services Manager (DSM) and the list goes on and on! 😅

One area that I have been interested in diving deeper into is with our Private AI offerings and with the announcement of VMware Private AI Services (PAIS) now included as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), it gave me that additional motivation to see if I could also run PAIS in my lab!

As part of my exploration, I will be documenting my experience in a mini-blog series on installing and configuring PAIS to deploy an AI Agent using an NVIDIA GPU with DirectPath I/O. Since NVIDIA vGPU requires an NVIDIA AI for Enterprise (NVAIE) license, this approach can especially be useful for lab and learning purposes.

Requirements:

  • VCF 9.0 environment deployed
  • NSX VPC configured with Centralized Transit Gateway
  • vSphere Supervisor configured with NSX VPC
  • VCF Automation configured to support vSphere Supervisor with (All Apps) Tenant Portal

[Read more...]

Categories // Private AI Services, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // VCF 9.0

Quick Tip - Custom JSON for Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with Custom TLS Certificates

09.23.2025 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

ESXi hosts deployed with a custom CA signed TLS certificate can be consumed by either VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x Cloud Builder or 9.x VCF Installer using a custom JSON deployment manifest.

An additional securitySpec should be appended to your VCF JSON deployment manifest using the following format:

"securitySpec": {
  "esxiCertsMode": "Custom",
  "rootCaCerts": [
    {
      "alias": "custom-CA",
      "certChain": [
        "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----\nMIIDqzC...\n...\n...==\n-----END CERTIFICATE-----"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

[Read more...]

Categories // Security, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // VCF 9.0

Using vSphere 9.0 API to retrieve vGPU & DirectPath Profiles

09.16.2025 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 has introduced a number of enhancements when consuming vGPU and DirectPath Profiles, which are available in both the vSphere UI and vSphere API for automation purposes. While answering some vSphere API questions from a colleague regarding vGPU and DirectPath Profiles, I figured it would be useful to share the vSphere API specifics in how to use the API to retrieve these resources and better yet, some code that you can use immediately!
[Read more...]

Categories // Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, Private AI Services, vSphere 9.0 Tags // DirectPath, VCF 9.0, vGPU

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Author

William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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