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.
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.
Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Many thanks for providing these details.
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
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
I certainly don't think apologies are in order 😉 I am most grateful for all you do here!