After deploying a new VMware Cloud Foundation environment in my lab, I typically apply a set of post-deployment configurations across components such as vCenter and NSX, depending on the specific scenarios I am testing.
I finally found some time to automate these manual tasks, as they were finally getting annoying but not annoying enough at the beginning to automate them immediately 😅
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. 😵💫
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 🙂
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.
