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AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling

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Happy Friday! šŸ„³

A couple of weeks back, Wenchao (creator of the Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) reached out to me to share an exciting development he had been working on.

Unlike traditional enterprise hardware, which typically includes an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) for exposing various hardware statistics, consumer systems like the popular Minisforum MS-A2 lack this capability out of the box.

Wenchao has developed a pseudo-IPMI driver for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 platforms that surfaces the CPU thermal and I am excited to share this will be released as a new Fling!


In addition to viewing this information via the vSphere UI, usersĀ can also retrieve the raw metrics via ESXCLI:

esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list


The driver currently supports the following:

  • ESX 9.0+
  • ESX 8.0 Update 3

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Quick Tip: High CPU Utilization on ESX due to Slow Entropy from AMD Zen 4 CPUs

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I had been troubleshooting a stubborn CPU utilization issue with a workload that, over time would also overrun the CPU on my physical ESX host. The assumption was that the workload was causing the issue, but after several rounds of collecting various ESX performance statistics, there was nothing conclusive that the workload was the culprit.

An interesting observation from some of the ESXi VMkernel Engineering team was that my VMkernel log contained a large number entropy errors:

NRandomHwrng: 246: Out of entropy, refreshing

The engineering team suspected that these entropy issues could actually be the root cause of the issues I had observed, especially as they have seen something simliar in another case when entropy requests fail.

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Automating VCF 9.0 Single Sign-On (SSO) with OIDC-based Identity Provider

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Configuring VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Single Sign-On (SSO), introduced in VCF 9.0, can be quite lengthy, especially when you go through the workflow for the first time.


For my lab setup, I use Keycloak, a popular and free OIDC-based IdP, and have documented a step-by-step guide for using it with VCF SSO.

Even as an experienced user of VCF SSO, I find the configuration can still take several minutes, depending on your familiarity with the UI inputs. This is something I have wanted to automate for some time, but it meant digging into the private API calls used by the VCF Operations UI.

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