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Maximizing vSAN ESA Performance on Minisforum MS-A2

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I have been running the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 stack using the Minisforum MS-A2 in a three-node configuration for almost a year now. While the MS-A2 is not hardware that you would find on the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG), these units have been solid for my lab environment.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting my lab through its paces while testing various VCF.Next deployment and upgrade scenarios, and I began to notice the environment was sluggish, which was not something I had experienced before.

Long story short, after hours of debugging, including over the weekend with the amazing Nicholas Wilson, we were able to pinpoint one of the issues (more details at the end for the other issue) related to the onboard 10GbE SFP+ adapters. The MS-A2 uses an Intel x710, which apparently have been quite notorious when it comes to hardware offload. 😵‍💫

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Retrieving the vSAN Cluster Shutdown VMs running Pre-Check Results using PowerCLI

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The vSAN Cluster Shutdown capability has been around since vSAN 7 Update 3 and has been enhanced over the years, most recently with the introduction of a vSAN Cluster Shutdown Wizard as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 release.


For those looking to automate the shutdown of their vSAN Cluster, we have a number of PowerCLI cmdlets: Get-VsanClusterPowerState, Start-VsanCluster and Stop-VsanCluster that simplifies this process in addition to the new UI interface, all leveraging the vSAN Management APIs.

Before the vSAN Cluster can initiate the shutdown workflow, it needs to make sure all VMs (excluding the vCenter Server VM that is managing the vSAN Cluster) has been powered off. For large environments, it can take some time to power off all VMs, which means you might need to poll or wait before running the Stop-VsanCluster cmdlet.

Instead of having to write additional code to wait for all your VMs to shutdown, you can leverage one of the vSAN Health Check Perspectives that will conveniently let you know when the vSAN Cluster is ready to be shutdown.

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Enhancement in VCF 9.0.1 to bypass vSAN ESA HCL & Host Commission 10GbE NIC Check

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1 is the first maintenance release for VCF 9.0, delivering a number of important fixes but also several exciting enhancements for lab deployments or running proof-of-concepts (PoC).

VCF 9.0 had already introduced a number of built-in capabilities and some neat “tricks” that makes it easier than ever to deploy a minimal VCF footprint, which you can read more about here.

However, there were still a couple of minor annoyances around vSAN ESA HCL or Host Commissioning pre-checks that could be improved to provide a better customer experience when deploying VCF for non-production usage. With feedback to VCF Engineering, I am pleased to share that these issues have now been addressed as part of VCF 9.0.1 release!

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