Category: VMware & Cloud
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Running NVIDIA AI On-Prem and on VCF: Cost, Trade-offs and the Verdict (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 30)
The finale: running the NVIDIA AI stack on bare metal, on VMware Cloud Foundation, or in the cloud; the real total cost of an AI factory; and the verdict on when to build versus rent.
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VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Lab Workbook: A Beginner’s End-to-End Hands-On Task List
An instructor-style VCF 9 lab workbook for beginners: a lab-pod map, the phase-by-phase journey, a snapshot and rollback strategy, and grouped task tables from prep and bring-up through workload domains, NSX, storage, certificates, operations, upgrade, backup and teardown – with success-validation checks and a competency sign-off rubric.
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GPU Memory and Precision: HBM3e, HBM4 and What Actually Fits (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 4)
A 70B model in FP16 needs 140 GB of weights before a single token of context. Here is the GPU memory and precision math that decides what fits, why HBM (not FLOPS) is the real ceiling, and where FP8 and NVFP4 buy you headroom.
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Generating Certificates End to End in VCF 9: From CSR to Auto-Renewal (VCF 9 Series, Part 36)
A hands-on guide for VCF administrators: how certificate management works in VCF 9, preparing your Microsoft CA, generating a CSR, signing and replacing certificates from the VCF Operations console, and enabling automatic renewal.
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NVIDIA Data-Center GPU Lineup: Hopper vs Blackwell vs Rubin (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 3)
The NVIDIA data-center GPU lineup from Hopper to Blackwell to Rubin, compared for training and inference: memory, bandwidth, FP4 and rack-scale NVL72, with a clear way to choose.
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Notifications and the Consumer Experience in VCF Automation (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 41)
Governance without notice feels like sabotage. This is how notifications work in VCF Automation 9: the outbound email scenarios, the in-UI reports and alerts, provider-controlled tenant visibility, and how to make sure the warnings actually get read.
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Content Sources and Content Sharing in VCF Automation: Feeding the Catalog (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 40)
Authoring a template and delivering it are two different jobs. This is the content-source and content-sharing model that gets templates into the VCF Automation catalog and in front of the right projects, plus the 9.1 Project Content Library.
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Identity, SSO and Custom Roles in VCF Automation: Wiring Up the VCF Identity Broker and RBAC (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 37)
How identity actually flows in VCF Automation 9: the VCF Identity Broker and VCF SSO for the provider plane, per-organization external IdPs for tenants, the OIDC claim-mapping that silently breaks group membership, and custom roles, rights bundles and global roles for RBAC, with a real vmware/vcfa Terraform example.
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Consuming All Apps the Kubernetes-Native Way in VCF Automation: kubectl and YAML (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 36)
The All Apps organization presents a Kubernetes-style API, so developers provision VMs, databases and clusters with kubectl and YAML. Here is the vcf-cli and token setup, the declarative flow, and when to use it over the portal or Terraform.
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Governing Private AI Consumption in VCF Automation: GPU Quotas, Policies and Roles (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 35)
GPU is the most expensive resource you will ever put behind self-service. Here is how to govern Private AI consumption in VCF Automation 9.1 with namespace GPU quotas, consumption policies, roles and per-namespace activation, without touching the AI stack itself.
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Property Groups and Secrets in VCF Automation: Reusable Inputs, Not Copy-Paste (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 34)
Inputs, property groups and secrets in VCF Automation 9 look interchangeable and are not. Where each value belongs, the scoping traps, the binding syntax, and how rotation actually works.
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How to Run Workloads in VCF Automation: VM Service, Container Service, Namespaces and VKS (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 39)
VCF 9.1 gives a workload four ways to run: a VM, a container with no cluster, a Supervisor namespace, or a full VKS cluster. What each is, how the namespace is the unit you hand a tenant, when a namespace beats a cluster, and a clear verdict.
Architect’s Toolkit
PJ’s Tools
- Infra 360 Hub – All Series
- VCF 9 Interactive Walkthroughs
- VCF Design Cheatsheet
- VCF Upgrade Planner
- VCF 9 Series Hub
- VCF Deployment Hub
- AI Stack Hub
- AI Infra Sizing & Cost Calculator
- LLM & RAG Cost Calculator
- DrJhaGPT – Ask Pranay
VMware Cloud Foundation
- VCF Documentation
- VCF 9 Planning & Preparation Workbook
- VCF Bill of Materials (BoM)
- VMware Compatibility Guide
- VMware Interoperability Matrix
- VMware Configuration Maximums
- VMware Ports & Protocols
- VMware Hands-on Labs
- RVTools Download
Nutanix
AI & Cloud-Native Platform
- NVIDIA Build (Model Catalog)
- NVIDIA AI Enterprise Reference Architecture
- NVIDIA NIM Performance Benchmarking
- NVIDIA NGC Catalog
- NeMo Microservices Helm Chart
- Helm Charts Repository
- Hugging Face Models
Architecture & Design
About the Author
Dr Pranay Jha
Dr. Pranay Jha is a Cloud and AI Consultant with 18+ years of experience in hybrid cloud, virtualization, and enterprise infrastructure transformation. He specializes in VMware technologies, multi-cloud strategy, and Generative AI solutions. He holds a PhD in Computer Applications with research focused on Cloud and AI, has published multiple research papers, and has been a VMware vExpert since 2016 and a VMUG Community Leader.
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