Those who are familiar with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) are aware that deploying the management domain requires a minimum of 4 ESXi hosts. In a production environment, this is not a problem, but in resource-crunched Lab/PoC environments, it is very difficult to deploy the full-fledged management domain.

In this blog post, I am going to demonstrate how to deploy a VCF management domain with just a single ESXi host in a nested lab. This tidbit will be very helpful for the folks who want to test VCF but don’t have adequate resources available in the lab.

I am following VCF 5.1.1 BOM for my deployment. I will cover resource requirements as well as touch base on the nested ESXi configuration. Let’s get started!!!

Nested ESXi Configuration

1: Resource Allocation

The nested ESXi was deployed with 96 GB Memory and 14 CPUs, 2 network adapters, and 1000 GB SSD storage. Although 96 GB is a bit less especially if you plan to deploy NSX Edges later after the SDDC bringup.… Read More