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Quick Tip - Disable ESX Live Patching enforcement to enable vSphere Supervisor

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While enabling the vSphere Supervisor on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 setup, I came across an error I had not seen before as I have performed this numerous times across both vSphere 8.x and vSphere 9.0:

A general system error occurred: Solution specification in the image are incompatible with hosts 'esx02.vcf.lab, esx01.vcf.lab'


I was going through various vCenter Server logs files, but was not able to find anything useful and the strangest part was the vSphere Supervisor Service was already up and running but something about incompatibility and image.

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Identifying vSphere Supervisor Managed VMs

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With an increasing number of customers enabling the vSphere Supervisor capability, which is included in both VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), more and more Virtual Machines will be deployed using the more modern approach of declarative provisioning using the powerful VM Service feature.


When using the vSphere UI, you can easily distinguish between a vSphere Supervisor managed VM from a traditional VM by checking whether it is provisioned within a vSphere Namespace or whether it contains the "Developer Managed" label as shown in the screenshot above.

However, how do you identify a vSphere Supervisor managed VM when using the vSphere API for Automation purposes?

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NVIDIA GPU with Dynamic DirectPath IO (Passthrough) to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster using vSphere with Tanzu

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When provisioning a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster (TKC) using vSphere with Tanzu, you can easily request an NVIDIA GPU resource as part of the deployment, which can either be provided by NVIDIA vGPU or using PCIe passthrough with Dynamic DirectPath IO.

vGPU is great for those with a capable NVIDIA GPU, especially if the GPU will not be utilized 100% and you can share its resources amongst several VMs. However, if you do not have a capable GPU that supports vGPU, you can still provide you TKC workloads with a GPU resource using passthrough.


While playing with the Lenovo P3 Ultra, I unfortunately came to learn that NVIDIA RTX A5500 Laptop was NOT the same as an NVIDIA RTX A5500 🙁

Not ideal, but I guess NVIDIA did not want to add this additional device to their test matrix and hence their ESXi graphics drivers would not detect the GPU as vGPU capable. I knew that I could still use the NVIDIA GPU via passthrough but to my surprise, I just needed to get the NVIDIA drivers installed onto the TKC worker nodes.

That was much easier said than done as all the documentation that I could find on both VMware and NVIDIA website had detailed instructions for vGPU configuration but there was little to no documentation on how to use NVIDIA GPU in passthrough mode with vSphere with Tanzu. I came across a number of different NVIDIA solutions when it comes to k8s, but it was not very clear on which would be interoperable with vSphere with Tanzu and I eventually figured it out with the help pointing me in the right direction.

It was actually super easy, once you knew the exact steps! ?

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