Category: VMware & Cloud
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VCF 9.1 Network, DNS and NTP Setup (VCF 9.1 Deployment Step by Step Guide, Part 3)
A step by step guide to preparing DNS, NTP, VLANs and IP ranges for a VCF 9.1 management domain, so the VCF Installer prechecks pass on the first run.
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VCF 9.1 Deployment Prerequisites and Readiness Checklist (VCF 9.1 Deployment Step by Step Guide, Part 2)
A step by step VCF 9.1 deployment prerequisites and readiness checklist covering ESX hosts, DNS, NTP, IP addressing, appliance sizing and the installer pre checks you run before bring up.
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VCF 9.1 Deployment Overview and Component Checklist (VCF 9.1 Deployment Step by Step Guide, Part 1)
The three supported ways into VCF 9.1, a greenfield VCF Installer build, converging an existing vSphere estate, or importing a brownfield vSAN and NSX environment, and how to choose the right one for your starting point.
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VCF Design Diagrams Cheatsheet for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1
An interactive reference for the VMware Cloud Foundation 9 design models. Pick a fleet blueprint or a distributed switch model on the left and get its diagram, published attributes, design requirement identifiers and the failure mode that catches people out.
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FinOps Tooling, Maturity and the Roadmap That Follows (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 20)
Three organisations bought the same cost platform and got three different outcomes. Here is how to choose FinOps tooling, read the maturity model honestly, and build a twelve month roadmap that ends in decisions rather than dashboards.
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How to Build a FinOps Team and an Operating Model That Holds (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 19)
Tooling does not decide whether a FinOps practice survives. Reporting lines, decision rights and cadence do. A practitioner guide to FinOps team roles, centralised versus hub and spoke structures, sizing, and where to report.
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FinOps Automation With Guardrails, Policy and Infrastructure as Code (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 18)
Alerts tell you money already left. Policy stops it leaving. A practitioner guide to cost guardrails on AWS, Azure and GCP, plus cost checks in the pull request, and where automation goes wrong.
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FinOps for AI and GPU Spend, Tokens and Utilisation (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 17)
A GPU sitting at 30 percent utilisation costs more per useful hour than the provider you rejected for being expensive. Here is how AI spend actually meters, and which levers move it.
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Serverless and Managed Service Cost on AWS, Azure and GCP (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 16)
Two near identical functions, twenty times the cost. Billing granularity, not the published rate, decides what short serverless functions cost, and concurrency moves the number further than any platform choice.
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Kubernetes Cost Allocation and Container FinOps (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 15)
A Kubernetes bill arrives as one enormous compute line with no team names on it. How asset, workload, idle and overhead costs actually split, what the control plane really costs on EKS, GKE and AKS, and who should be charged for idle.
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Cloud Storage and Data Transfer Costs, Where the Money Actually Hides (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 14)
A storage class has four prices, not one, and the cheap-looking tier is often the expensive choice for small objects. How minimum durations, minimum billable object sizes, retrieval fees and data transfer boundaries really work on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
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Spot and Interruptible Capacity Without Losing Work (Cloud FinOps Series, Part 13)
Spot capacity is the deepest discount in cloud and the only one you have to earn with engineering. How interruption works on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, which workloads can take it, and why the savings curve flattens long before 90 percent spot.
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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