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NVMe Tiering with AMD Ryzen CPU workaround for VCF 9.0

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If you have an AMD Ryzen processor and you are planning on use the NVMe Tiering feature with either VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you will need to apply the following workaround for your VMs to properly boot.

Note: This workaround is only required on AMD Ryzen (Consumer) CPU with NVMe Tiering enabled and does not affect AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon or Intel  Core (Consumer) CPUs with our without NVMe Tiering.

On an AMD Ryzen CPU that has NVMe Tiering enabled, when powering on a VM, you might notice the operating system does not fully boot and the VM console may become unresponsive. After spending some time debugging with Engineering, it looks like there are some issues with specific AMD Ryzen CPU instructions that is causing the VM to behave this way when NVMe Tiering is enabled.

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vSAN ESA Disk & HCL Workaround for VCF 9.0

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vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) has become the preferred architecture when deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those interested in exploring vSAN ESA with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 but may not have compatible hardware from the vSAN ESA HCL, there are a couple of workarounds that you might want to be aware of.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk. For production deployments, you should be using supported vSAN ESA Hardware which you can refer to Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

There are potentially two scenarios you may come across when using vSAN ESA to deploy your initial and/or extending your VCF Fleet.

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Disable 10GbE NIC Pre-Check in the VCF 9.0 Installer

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By default, the new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 Installer will validate the ESXi management interface is at a 10GbE network adaptor and it will prevent users from proceeding if the minimum link speed is not detected.


This pre-check had also existed in VCF 5.x and users could bypass the pre-check, but it required users to deploy using the VCF Cloud Builder API which was not as nice when compared to using the VCF Cloud Builder UI.

While the default behavior is designed for production-grade environments, there is a much simpler way to disable this pre-check for lab purposes in VCF 9.0 and it would allow users to use either the VCF Installer UI or API!

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk

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