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VCF 9.0 Installer workaround for ESXi hosts with different vendor

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If you are using ESXi hosts that have mixed hardware vendors, the VCF 9.0 Installer will throw the following error as shown in the screenshot below:

ESX Hosts don't have the same vendor. vLCM is not supported on ESX Hosts with different vendor. Found vendors are: [micro computer (hk) tech limited. gmktec]


The reason as outlined is that vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) does not support heterogeneous hardware vendors when it attempts to construct the vLCM Image Profile for the vSphere Cluster that is for your VCF Management Domain.

With that said, for lab purposes there is a workaround ...

In fact, this was something I had shared a while back which is the ability to simulate custom ESXi SMBIOS strings and I just recalled the solution because I wanted to test something out but unfourntately, my ESXi hosts were from two different hardware vendors.

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NVMe Tiering with AMD Ryzen CPU workaround for VCF 9.0

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If you have an AMD Ryzen processor and you are planning on use the NVMe Tiering feature with either VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you will need to apply the following workaround for your VMs to properly boot.

Note: This workaround is only required on AMD Ryzen (Consumer) CPU with NVMe Tiering enabled and does not affect AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon or Intel  Core (Consumer) CPUs with our without NVMe Tiering.

On an AMD Ryzen CPU that has NVMe Tiering enabled, when powering on a VM, you might notice the operating system does not fully boot and the VM console may become unresponsive. After spending some time debugging with Engineering, it looks like there are some issues with specific AMD Ryzen CPU instructions that is causing the VM to behave this way when NVMe Tiering is enabled.

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vSAN ESA Disk & HCL Workaround for VCF 9.0

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vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) has become the preferred architecture when deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For those interested in exploring vSAN ESA with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 but may not have compatible hardware from the vSAN ESA HCL, there are a couple of workarounds that you might want to be aware of.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by Broadcom, please use at your own risk. For production deployments, you should be using supported vSAN ESA Hardware which you can refer to Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

There are potentially two scenarios you may come across when using vSAN ESA to deploy your initial and/or extending your VCF Fleet.

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