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How to upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with PVSCSI controller incompatibility?

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If you are running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab using Nested ESXi and you attempt an upgrade workflow, you may find the following upgrade pre-check fail with the following message: VSAN SCSI controller is not VMware certified


You might think you are out of luck, but it is actually pretty straight forward to bypass the checks and still allow the upgrade to proceed, something I recently went through myself when upgrading my VCF 5.1.1 environment to the latest 5.2 release.

Note: To use vSAN ESA in VCF, you should configure your Nested ESXi VM to use an NVMe Controller instead of PVSCSI Controller, so its possible that by changing the controller type, you may not run into this error simliar to findings here. You can also override the vSAN HCL JSON with your own custom HCL JSON which includes the PVSCSI controller by following the blog post here and that would also allow you to proceed, but steps below are the easiest as you do not have to do anything special.

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New PCI Compliance Audit APIs for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2

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One very interesting capability that I had noticed while reading the the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 release notes are new VCF APIs for auditing PCI Compliance.

VCF users can now use a new set of APIs that audit VCF configuration for compliance with 9 relevant PCI-DSS controls

In addition to exploring these new VCF APIs, I thought this would also be a good opportunity to contribute to the popular PowerShell Module for VMware Cloud Foundation which is also the basis for several other useful VCF modules for automation:

To demonstrate the new VCF Compliance Audit APIs, I crated the following new functions which I have also submitted a pull request (PR) 291 to incorporate functions in a future release of the PowerShell Module for VMware Cloud Foundation, which I hope will get merged by the time this blog post is live!

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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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