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Quick Tip - Improved NVMe Tiering Device Health Monitoring in VCF 9.1

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Unfortunately, one of my consumer-grade NVMe SSD devices that I had configured for NVMe Tiering (Memory Tiering) in my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1.1 environment had recently degraded. While vCenter Server had raised an alarm stating “NVMe Memory Tiering device is not healthy.”, I had dismissed it since the alarm did not provide any additional details about the underlying issue.

In VCF 9.1, NVMe Tiering usage can be conveniently viewed inn the vSphere UI under the Memory tile for either a selected ESX host or vSphere Cluster, which summarizes both Tier 0 (DRAM) and Tier 1 (NVMe Tiering) usage.


When it comes to understanding the actual health of an NVMe device used for NVMe Tiering, I was not sure whether looking at the SMART data was still the recommended approach or if there was a better way?

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Using VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) with a Kerberos-Authenticated HTTPS Proxy

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While modern authentication protocols like OAuth 2.0 and mTLS are the de-facto standard these days, Kerberos-based (GSS-API/SPNEGO) authentication is still commonly used within many enterprise organizations. The challenge is that many modern applications and development frameworks do not natively support Kerberos authentication or provide libraries that make integration straightforward, which can make supporting these environments difficult.

The VCF Download Tool (VCFDT) is one such example. While it supports connecting to an HTTPS proxy with basic authentication, it does not natively support Kerberos authentication. This is where Px can help by acting as an intermediary running locally on the same system as VCFDT, enabling it to connect through a Kerberos-authenticated HTTPS proxy.

Here is a quick visual (thanks to ChatGPT) that demonstrates the connection flow from the client system (client.vcf.lab) running VCFDT, which uses an authenticated keytab from the Kerberos server (kdc.vcf.lab) to authenticate with the proxy server (proxy.vcf.lab). Once authenticated, VCFDT can connect to broadcom.com through the proxy to download the required software binaries and metadata.

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VCF 9.1.1 - Connecting Pi Coding Agent to VCF Private AI Services (PAIS)

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If you have used Claude Code, Cursor, or OpenAI Codex, you have already experienced Agentic AI, whether it is coding an application, creating a quick script, or debugging an issue. The use cases are infinite, and like many, you can easily burn through your token quota when using the latest state-of-the-art Frontier AI models, which are simply amazing!

While spending some time playing with our latest VCF Private AI Services (PAIS) release (here and here), I have also been trading notes with colleagues doing something similar but rolling their own local AI stack using just vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) running on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1.1. Through those conversations, I came to learn about Pi, not the number, but a lightweight coding agent and agent harness that can connect to a number of AI model providers, including those providing an OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Since VCF PAIS provides an OpenAI-compatible endpoint that can serve one or more AI models, you can now have your own Agentic AI using Pi running within your on-premises environment using various open weight models! 😎

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