Category: VMware & Cloud
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VKS Architecture: Supervisor, Namespaces and Workload Clusters (VKS Series, Part 2)
The Supervisor, vSphere Namespaces and workload clusters look alike and behave nothing alike. Here is how the three layers fit together, and where tenancy actually lives.
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What vSphere Kubernetes Service Is and Why It Replaced TKG (VKS Series, Part 1)
VKS is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service renamed, not a new product. Here is what actually changed under the rename, where VKS sits in VCF 9, and who it is really for.
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VCF 9 Bundle Download Failed in SDDC Manager: Causes and Fixes
VCF 9 bundle downloads showing Failed in SDDC Manager or VCF Operations are almost always a depot authorization or configuration issue, not your network. Diagnose by HTTP code and fix each root cause: token, entitlement (403), HTTPS-disabled depot, proxy, and Product Version Catalog corruption.
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VCF 9 Login Accounts: Which User ID for Which Component, and What For
One of the most common sources of confusion in VMware Cloud Foundation is simply: which user ID do I log in with, and to what? Is it vcf, root, admin, or administrator@vsphere.local? Every VCF 9 component ships its own built-in accounts, each meant for a different job — UI, API, SSH/OS, or a service account VCF…
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VCF 9 Interactive Walkthroughs
A set of interactive, click-through walkthroughs for deploying, upgrading and operating VMware Cloud Foundation 9 and its components. Pick one below — each opens a full-screen, step-by-step navigator you can follow on a second screen, with a Full plan / print export. VCF 9 Deployment WalkthroughGreenfield bring-up of the management domain via the VCF Installer…
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VMware Private AI vs Red Hat OpenShift AI vs Hyperscaler Managed AI: An Honest Verdict (Private AI Series, Part 30)
Three ways to run enterprise inference, three very different trade-offs. A straight comparison of VMware Private AI Foundation, Red Hat OpenShift AI and hyperscaler managed AI, ending in a clear verdict.
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Disaster Recovery and Multi-Tenancy for VMware Private AI: What to Protect and How to Share (Private AI Series, Part 29)
Most of your AI platform is reproducible, a small part is not. Here is a reference design for backing up the stateful pieces of VMware Private AI and sharing GPU clusters across teams without a free-for-all.
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Guardrails and Responsible AI on VMware Private AI: What NeMo Guardrails Actually Stops (Private AI Series, Part 28)
Private does not mean safe. Here is how NeMo Guardrails wraps your models on VMware Private AI, the five rail types, and an honest line on what guardrails catch and what they do not.
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Fine-Tuning Models on VMware Private AI with NeMo Customizer: LoRA, Full SFT and When to Bother (Private AI Series, Part 27)
RAG is not always the answer. Here is how NeMo Customizer fine-tunes models on VMware Private AI, the difference between LoRA and full SFT, and an honest take on when customization beats retrieval.
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Networking for VMware Private AI Workloads: Segmentation, Ingress and the East-West Path (Private AI Series, Part 26)
Model serving lives or dies on the network nobody designed. Here is how to segment AI namespaces with NSX, expose inference endpoints through the Gateway API and the load balancer, and keep RAG east-west traffic fast and private.
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NVIDIA NIM Operator on VMware Private AI: The Reference Architecture for Declarative Model Serving (Private AI Series, Part 25)
The NIM Operator is the Kubernetes-native control plane for model serving on VMware Private AI. Here is how its CRDs, caching and autoscaling actually fit together, and the vGPU constraint that bites multi-GPU models.
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VMware Private AI Foundation Upgrade: Moving from VCF 9.0 to 9.1 Without Breaking Your GPUs (Private AI Series, Part 24)
A practical 9.0 to 9.1 upgrade runbook for VMware Private AI Foundation, plus a closing verdict on the platform after 24 parts. The order of operations, the vGPU driver branch trap, and host-by-host GPU domain remediation.
Architect’s Toolkit
PJ’s Tools
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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