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Maximizing vSAN ESA Performance on Minisforum MS-A2

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I have been running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 stack using the Minisforum MS-A2 in a three-node configuration for almost a year now. While the MS-A2 is not hardware that you would find on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), these units have been solid for my lab environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting my lab through its paces while testing various VCF.Next deployment and upgrade scenarios, and I began to notice the environment was sluggish, which was not something I had experienced before.

Long story short, after hours of debugging, including over the weekend with the amazing Nicholas Wilson, we were able to pinpoint one of the issues (more details at the end for the other issue) related to the onboard 10GbE SFP+ adapters. The MS-A2 uses an Intel x710, which apparently have been quite notorious when it comes to hardware offload. 😵‍💫

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Creating Custom Virtual Machine Classes using vSphere API

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Back in 2020, the vSphere UI was the only way to create your own custom Virtual Machine Classes, there was not a vSphere API and while you can directly connect to vSphere Supervisor Control Plane, it was not officially supported 🙂

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With the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 2, the vSphere Automation REST API has been enhanced to include APIs for managing VM Classes.

A question recently came up about automating custom VM Classes. While the user referenced my earlier blog post, I realized I had not revisited this topic using the updated vSphere REST API. This was a great opportunity to provide a working example and timely, as I had just got access to Cursor.

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VCF Installer Deploying VVF Components with VCF Entitlements

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Despite its name, the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Installer can deploy both VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) environments. Many users incorrectly believe the VCF Installer restricts you to only the specific product deployments that you have entitlements for, VVF deployment for VVF entitlements and VCF deployments for VCF entitlements.

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The VCF Installer does NOT care nor has any knowledge of your license entitlements when performing a deployment. In fact, both VVF and VCF deployments will default to the 90 day evaluation period until the components are licensed by VCF Operations, which is performed by a user post-deployment to retrieve product entitlements.

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