WilliamLam.com

NVMe Tiering in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 is a Homelab game changer!

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As someone who is always on the lookout for interesting and clever ways to make the most out of your vSphere homelab investment, I was surprised there has not been more noise about the new NVMe Tiering capability in vSphere 8.0 Update 3!?

NVMe Tiering is currently in Tech Preview and it enables ESXi to use an NVMe device as a secondary tier of memory for your workloads, which IMHO makes it one of the killer features in vSphere 8.0 Update 3, especially with some interesting implications for Homelabs!

As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words ...


Picture on the left shows a system with 64GB of memory (DRAM) that is available before enabling NVMe Tiering and on the right, the amount of memory that is available after enabling the NVMe Tiering which is whopping 480GB! 🤯

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Automated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 Import Lab Deployment Script

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 had just GA'ed last week and it is a packed release with a ton of new capabilities! Creating a brand new VCF environment (greenfield) is generally much easier than converting an existing vSphere-based environment (brownfield) into a compliant VCF environment, which can be quite challenging and our users have been asking for a better solution.

With VCF 5.2, we now have the ability to import or convert an existing vSphere and vSAN environment into either a VCF Management Domain or Workload Domain using a new VCF Import Tool without needing to rebuild your existing environment!

As with anything I do, I typically want my infrastructure setup be fully automated, so that I can actually spend time exploring the actual capability and not waste time deploying or installing the required prerequisites. After spending a few minutes reading through the VCF Import Tool Scenarios and Considerations, I could adapt my Automated vSphere Lab Deployment scripts (here and here) to automatically deploy the required environment, so that I could quickly try out the new VCF Import Tool.

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Quick Tip - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 provisioning fails with Update SDDC Manager with Licensing Information

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Since the introduction of the License Later feature with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1.1, I typically deploy my VCF lab without needing any license keys and simply take advantage of the built-in 60 day evaluation period.

I was doing some testing recently with the latest VCF 5.2 release, which had just GA'ed last week and I wanted to use my new VCF licenses which included vCenter Server, ESXi, vSAN and NSX and right before the deployment was about to finish, I ran into the following error Update SDDC Manager with Licensing Information with Cloud Builder:


I thought the error was strange since my license keys had passed the Cloud Builder pre-check, so I had assumed the issue must be something else but after looking at the log file /var/log/operationsmanager.log on SDDC Manager:

Unable to decode the license key XXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-YYYYY

com.vmware.licensecheck.SerialNumException: Invalid serial number: no dormant license file corresponding to the serial number

....

"errorCode":"LICENSE_KEY_NOT_RECOGNISED","arguments":[],"message":"The SDDC Manager is unable to recognize the license key. Try applying the license key to the product.","remediationMessage":"Try applying the license key to the product."

I quickly saw what the problem was which is that SDDC Manager is missing certain dormant license file (DLF) to decode several of the VCF license keys including the new vSAN TiB license which is only supported with vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and later.
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