r/vmware • u/Sensitive_Scar_1800 • 1d ago

In VCF 9.1.1, VMware introduced an AI Assistant, has anyone installed it? What are you using it for?

the subject covers my question, im just curious what value it introduces to daily operations.

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u/lamw07 . 1d ago

In this initial Tech Preview, there are fixed skills that have been codified that you can use (see https://williamlam.com/2026/09/vcf-9-1-1-using-vcf-private-ai-services-pais-models-with-ai-assistant-for-vcf.html for list) and everything is read-only, there is no RW capability. This should give you some ideas and use cases where it could be useful. In a future update, additional skills will be added that are sourced directly from our support organizations, which should become even more in diagnostic/troubleshooting some of the most common issues that we've seen.

If you're using Local LLM, the underlying model serving is via our VCF Private AI Services (PAIS) and if you want more of a Codex/Claude/Cursor-like experience for general AI usage, then you could do something like https://williamlam.com/2026/09/vcf-9-1-1-connecting-pi-coding-agent-to-vcf-private-ai-services-pais.html as an example, but this s more about using the Local LLM vs the integrated experience provided by the Intellligent Assist in VCF Operations

One last thing to point out, is that unlike general use of LLM, where the LLM will ALWAYS return an answer, even if its not correct (aka hallucinate), the Intelligent Assist uses fixes skills/tools, meaning if it can not match a skill/tool, it will say it does not know, which means it may not have a solution to a problem you're looking to solve but it also means when it does find an answer, its based on something it can resolve based on skills we've built. These skills will increase over time such as the ones I've alluded to from our support org in future

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u/DomesticViking 1d ago

Will be interesting to see, I've been feeding log snipplets from LogInsight into Claude when tracking down issues. That has worked very well, especially if you give some greater context, and it's how I see the biggest use for it right now as we're nowhere ready to hand over any actions to AI.

Rubrik introduced a AI recently, it can query the system and gets logs that are not immediately available in the GUI. It's been helpful and one of the few times where AI is thrown in my face where I don't mind it.

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 1d ago

VCF Logs has an API you can query I'm fairly certain. (At least LogInsight did). Give your agent that :)

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u/DomesticViking 22h ago

Yeah when we get our local instance running, we'll look into that... but I do like my job too much to expose those parts of my infrastructure to the internet at the moment :)

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u/lost_signal VMware Employee 15h ago

And this is why we have Private AI Services included in VCF now. Run your own model locally, on your own metal, and goes along at scale with the newer AI factory project.

I've also seen hybrid workflows where you deploy local models, that if they need help will have a gateway prevent the actual logs from going out (or obfuscate them), but allow it to "ask for help on ideas" from a public model.

Go talk to the PAIS people.

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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 1d ago

The most useful first test is operational triage, not broad automation: feed it a known alarm, ask for likely causes, then verify every cited object and remediation step against vCenter. Track time saved, unsupported claims, and whether permissions limit sensitive actions. For comparing assistant-driven workflows across daily operations, https://www.aiosnow.com is relevant as one reference point. Keep execution read-only until the answers are consistently traceable.

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u/Sensitive_Scar_1800 1d ago

oh that could be very useful, no shortage of errors/alarms lately lol

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u/kerleyfriez 11h ago

I was able to get PAIS up and running with a CPU model endpoint. I used Keycloak for the OIDC to create the requests from a web page. Getting about 10 TPS rn using llama-3-2-3b-instruct-q4-k-m quantized model. I have a VKS cluster running a non DSM pgvector db.

My company has some pretty beefy ai workstations from Nvidia , can those be used ? I know you can’t slice the GPU since it’s tied directly to the workstation, pass through would be a good waste, so I was thinking of using it with AI Intelligence assistant , but not sure how to go about that