Category: VMware & Cloud
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VCF 9 Performance Tuning vs Cost Optimization: Where to Spend Your Effort (VCF 9 Series, Part 35)
Performance tuning and cost optimization in VCF 9 pull in opposite directions. Here is which levers help which goal, where they collide, and the order I run them in on real clusters.
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VCF 9 Troubleshooting: The Stuck Workflows, Locks and Log Trails That Actually Bite (VCF 9 Series, Part 34)
A field guide to VCF 9 troubleshooting: clearing stuck SDDC Manager workflows, releasing the password and certificate system lock, pulling SoS support bundles, and reading the logs that actually tell you what failed.
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VCF 9 Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Extending the Private Cloud to the Hyperscalers (VCF 9 Series, Part 33)
A reference design for VCF 9 hybrid cloud: how the transit gateway, VPN, HCX and VCF Operations stitch your on-prem instance to Azure VMware Solution, GCVE and OCVS, and the version-skew and egress traps that catch teams in production.
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VCF 9 Automation and the API-First Stack: A Practical Runbook (VCF 9 Series, Part 32)
A practical runbook for automating VMware Cloud Foundation 9: set up OAuth 2.0 token authentication, pick between PowerCLI, the Unified SDK and Terraform, and wire it into CI/CD without leaking tokens.
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VCF 9 Multi-Instance Fleet Management Explained: One Operations Plane, Many Instances (VCF 9 Series, Part 31)
What a VCF 9 fleet really is, how one VCF Operations and VCF Automation plane governs many VCF instances, how to size it by objects and metrics rather than host counts, and when to split into more than one fleet.
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VCF 9 Stretched Clusters and Multi-Site Design: Topology, Witness and the Latency Budget (VCF 9 Series, Part 30)
A reference design for stretching VMware Cloud Foundation 9 across two sites: vSAN site awareness, witness placement, the 5ms latency budget, storage policy, and when a single stretched instance beats multi-instance federation.
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VCF 9 Hardware: The Compatibility Traps That Stall Bring-Up (VCF 9 Series, Part 29)
A field guide to the five hardware traps that stall VCF 9 bring-up: non-certified NVMe, a stale vSAN HCL, sub-25GbE NICs, SD/USB boot media, and under-spec hosts.
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Stretched Cluster vs Site Recovery in VCF 9: Choosing Your DR Architecture (VCF 9 Series, Part 28)
A vSAN stretched cluster is not a disaster recovery plan. Here is how stretched clustering and Site Recovery differ in VCF 9, what changed in the tooling, and when to use each (or both).
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VCF 9 Zero Trust Security Architecture: Identity, Segmentation and Platform Integrity (VCF 9 Series, Part 27)
Zero trust on VCF 9 is an architecture, not a checkbox. Here are the four enforcement planes, how they map to real VCF components, and the design calls that actually matter.
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How to Deploy VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA on VCF 9 (VCF 9 Series, Part 26)
A field-tested runbook for deploying VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA on VCF 9: the two deployment paths, the three licenses you need, GPU host prep, the right sharing mode, and the guided workflow, plus the gotchas that stall bring-up.
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VCF Automation in VCF 9 Explained: Provider, Organizations and Self-Service Cloud (VCF 9 Series, Part 25)
VCF Automation is not just Aria Automation with a new badge. Here is how the provider model, organizations, projects and built-in cloud services work in VCF 9, and the All Apps vs VM Apps decision you need to get right.
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vSphere Supervisor and VKS Architecture in VCF 9: The Reference Design (VCF 9 Series, Part 24)
How vSphere Supervisor and VKS fit together in VCF 9, from the control plane and vSphere Zones to networking, storage, and the design defaults you should override before you commit.
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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