I’ve been thinking a lot about how I wanted to go about building a VMware Cloud Foundation home lab for quite a while. My current home lab workstation isn’t up to the task as it didn’t meet the minimum specs to run VCF:

• Minimum CPU Cores: 16 physical CPU cores, 24+ cores strongly recommended for usability
• 2–3 ESXi hosts (physical or nested) 
• Adequate CPU/RAM (e.g., 128 GB+ per node recommended depending on nested sizing)
• Shared storage (NFS) if limited hosts
• Network connectivity (10 Gbe recommended but can bypass that requirement)

I looked at the cheapest option which was to buy a second hand HPE Z6 G4 workstation with as much hardware as I could afford and then run a nested environment as I have before (using VMware’s Holodeck). The other route was to go down the Minisforum MS-A2 route, as per William Lam’s blog. I decided to go down this route as even though it was more expensive it took up less room (keeps the wife happy 😉)  and pushes myself knowledge wise to establish. Also I had seen them at VMware Explore London and talked with Eric Nielsen in depth to understand how it was setup. As there was quite a lot of knowledge on these devices I decided to bite the bullet and go down this route. 

The full hardware list purchased was:

The most expensive thing on the list was the RAM which recently has increased in price massively (seems to keep on growing as well). The price for 128 GB of RAM for each host was just too much, so I opted for 96 GB per host. As we now have NVMe tiering which uses an NVMe disk as substitute RAM (hence the 1TB NVMe disks) this will hopefully alleviate this issue. So this means that we have the following for our home lab:

• 64 vCPU total, 32 vCPU per host ( a minimum of 24 vCPU are needed for VCF Automation alone!)
• 96 GB of physical RAM per host (1 TB with NVMe Tiering)
• 500 GB NVMe: ESXi installation, 1TB NVMe : NVMe Tiering, 2TB NVMe 3: vSAN ESA
• 2 x 10 Gbe, and 1 x 2.5 Gbe (each host has 2 x 2.5 Gbe but one is a Realtek network controller so won’t work with ESX)

My idea is to run this like in the following diagram:

Previously I hadn’t planned my home lab previous build so this time Im looking to plan and document it first. First I planned the VLANs configured for my networks:

And I also planned the initial VMs and their roles:

As mentioned previously, the planning element is something I’ve not done beforehand, and as I understand it the installation of VCF requires a lot of information. I’m hoping that this will make life easier. Especially if a rebuild is needed at any point.

 I already have a small mini desktop machine that I’m using with Proxmox to host a Domain Controller (to provide AD, DHCP,DNS, & NTP) and an Ubuntu server that will host the VCF Offline Bundle repository so that it doesn’t have to be downloaded should I need to rebuild it for any reason. The Ubuntu VM has a 1TB SSD attached which Im hoping will be enough. Now we have everything ready I can start configuring the Offline Bundle Depot download and the ESX build on the Minis Forum. Stay tuned!