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Quick Tip - Improved NVMe Tiering Device Health Monitoring in VCF 9.1

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Unfortunately, one of my consumer-grade NVMe SSD devices that I had configured for NVMe Tiering (Memory Tiering) in my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1.1 environment had recently degraded. While vCenter Server had raised an alarm stating “NVMe Memory Tiering device is not healthy.”, I had dismissed it since the alarm did not provide any additional details about the underlying issue.

In VCF 9.1, NVMe Tiering usage can be conveniently viewed inn the vSphere UI under the Memory tile for either a selected ESX host or vSphere Cluster, which summarizes both Tier 0 (DRAM) and Tier 1 (NVMe Tiering) usage.


When it comes to understanding the actual health of an NVMe device used for NVMe Tiering, I was not sure whether looking at the SMART data was still the recommended approach or if there was a better way?

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Using VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) with a Kerberos-Authenticated HTTPS Proxy

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While modern authentication protocols like OAuth 2.0 and mTLS are the de-facto standard these days, Kerberos-based (GSS-API/SPNEGO) authentication is still commonly used within many enterprise organizations. The challenge is that many modern applications and development frameworks do not natively support Kerberos authentication or provide libraries that make integration straightforward, which can make supporting these environments difficult.

The VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) is one such example. While it supports connecting to an HTTPS proxy with basic authentication, it does not natively support Kerberos authentication. This is where Px can help by acting as an intermediary running locally on the same system as VCFDT, enabling it to connect through a Kerberos-authenticated HTTPS proxy.

Here is a quick visual (thanks to ChatGPT) that demonstrates the connection flow from the client system (client.vcf.lab) running VCFDT, which uses an authenticated keytab from the Kerberos server (kdc.vcf.lab) to authenticate with the proxy server (proxy.vcf.lab). Once authenticated, VCFDT can connect to broadcom.com through the proxy to download the required software binaries and metadata.

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VCF 9.1.1 - Simplified vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) using VLAN-Backed VPCs without NSX Tunnel Endpoints (TEPs)

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As part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1.1 release, consuming NSX Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) has gotten simpler, especially for environments using traditional VLAN-backed networks. In VCF 9.1.0, users already had the ability to configure a VPC using a Distributed Transit Gateway (DTGW) and Distributed VLAN through the NSX Virtual Network Appliance (VNA), but this still required configuring NSX Tunnel Endpoints (TEPs) on each ESX host.

With VCF 9.1.1, the networking workflow has been further simplified with a new VLAN-backed VPC option. While it still uses DTGW and VNA, TEPs are no longer required, removing additional network requirements such as a larger MTU. As a result, environments that previously could not meet the networking requirements to configure a VPC can now deploy and consume services such as vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and VCF Automation (VCFA).

It is also important to understand the different VPC consumption options and their constraints. The following table summarizes the capabilities and limitations of each option.


Note: DTGW with TEP was possible with VCF 9.0.0 but there was no support for VCFA until VCF 9.1.0.

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