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You are here: Home / Automation / VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box 

VMUG Connect 2025 - Minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x in a Box 

05.15.2025 by William Lam // 5 Comments


I had a great time attending the inaugural VMUG Connect 2025 in St. Louis this past April. Like many others, the event was a great way to connect and share our passion for VMware technologies with both new and familiar faces from our community.

Here are a few great write-ups from attendees of the conference:

  • Daniel Kriger - VMUG Connect St. Louis 2025 (who I got to meet in person as we often chatted on social media)
  • Daniel Keer - I Went to VMUG Connect 2025
  • Maarten Van Driessen - VMUG Connect 2025
  • Justin Sider - VMUG Connect 2025 Connect Four Takeaways

In addition to the networking, there was a ton of great content from the community across the different technical and career building tracks.


For my breakout, I wanted to show how you can deploy a minimal VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x environment on a single physical ESXi host for development and lab purposes, with the goal of being able to explore and learn about VCF using a minimal amount of compute and storage resources.


As promised, I have published the following Github repository that contains all the details that you would need to set this up using the exact or simliar hardware configuration.

More from my site

  • VMUG Advantage Group Buy is back!
  • 2022 VMUG Advantage Community Group Buy
  • 2021 VMUG Advantage Community Group Buy
  • Special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy
  • Hope to see you at the Nordic VMUG UserCon in Dec!

Categories // Automation, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // VMUG

Comments

  1. *protectedTroy Wilfred says

    05/18/2025 at 7:41 am

    I love the methodology for a single node management domain setup for 5.2.1. I have looked at Github and studied your setup_vmware_cloud_builder_for_one_node_management_domain.sh script some. I am wondering how that could be modified for a 2 or 3 node management domain. How do you split up the workloads within the install process? I had heard that VCF9 may be able to use less nodes for the management domain but I don't want to wait for that for my lab.

    Reply
  2. *protectedKelly Peck says

    05/19/2025 at 1:13 am

    Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Many thanks for providing these details.

    Reply
  3. *protectedRichard July says

    05/28/2025 at 4:09 am

    Many thanks for posting this! I am giving it a try but am getting an error in cloudbuilder about the ESXi version:
    " Error connecting to ESXi Host
    ESXi Host .lab.local build is 24022510 but must be equal to 24280767 "

    Many thanks,
    Richard

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      05/28/2025 at 8:51 am

      Apologies, VCF 5.2.1 uses ESXi 8.0 Update 3b (not U3 base) https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-5-2-and-earlier/5-2/vcf-release-notes/vmware-cloud-foundation-521-release-notes.html and expected build number for ESXi 80u3b is 24280767

      I've fixed links on the repo and included build numbers

      Reply
      • *protectedRichard July says

        05/28/2025 at 11:10 pm

        I certainly don't think apologies are in order 😉 I am most grateful for all you do here!

        Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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