After recently sharing my automation for deploying the vDefend Security Services Platform (SSP) 5.2 Installer, the next logical step was automating the configuration of the SSP Installer and deployment of an SSP Instance. To make this easy and reusable, I have created a new PowerShell Module for vDefend SSP that automates these workflows from end to end.
After successfully deploying the vDefend Security Services Platform (SSP) 5.2 Installer, which I recently built some automation for, the next step is to deploy an SSP Instance. I was surprised to see there was a fairly hefty minimum storage pre-check of a little over 3.5TB, something I certainly hope my lab never gets close to consuming! Since thin provisioning is already used by default, ideally the minimum storage requirement should simply reflect what is needed for the selected form factor.
😅Fortunately, there is a workaround to skip the minimum storage pre-check and allow us to proceed with the SSP Instance deployment.
Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use only in a non-production environment for lab and learning purposes.
If you have used Claude Code, Cursor, or OpenAI Codex, you have already experienced Agentic AI, whether it is coding an application, creating a quick script, or debugging an issue. The use cases are infinite, and like many, you can easily burn through your token quota when using the latest state-of-the-art Frontier AI models, which are simply amazing!
While spending some time playing with our latest VCF Private AI Services (PAIS) release (here and here), I have also been trading notes with colleagues doing something similar but rolling their own local AI stack using just vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) running on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1.1. Through those conversations, I came to learn about Pi, not the number, but a lightweight coding agent and agent harness that can connect to a number of AI model providers, including those providing an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
Since VCF PAIS provides an OpenAI-compatible endpoint that can serve one or more AI models, you can now have your own Agentic AI using Pi running within your on-premises environment using various open weight models! 😎