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

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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:

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.

Programmatically accessing the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG)

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The Broadcom Compatibility Guide (formerly VMware Compatibility Guide) is where users would go to check hardware (new or existing) compatibility with VMware software.


There are a number of different compatibility guides that you can search through from CPU processors to servers to the various of I/O devices including accelerators and graphics cards. For users with a small number of hardware devices, search is pretty straight forward but if you have a variety of different hardware to check, the web interface may not be the quickest.

One thing that I was pleasantly surprised to learn was that the Broadcom Compatibility Guide (BCG) could easily be consumed programmatically, unlike the previous VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG) which had a different backend system.

While there is not an official BCG API, which would include documentation, support and backwards compatibility, users can interact with the BCG using the same API as the BCG web interface.

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Quick Tip - Validating Broadcom Download Token 

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As of last month, customers must generate a new download token from the Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) for in-product downloads of VMware software binaries (e.g. updates, security patches using SDDC Manager, vCenter Server, ESXi, etc.). The Broadcom download token must then be appended after the new product download base URI (e.g. https://dl.broadcom.com/TOKEN/...) and this will ensure you will be able to continue to download updates directly or indirectly (via network proxy) from within the products.

UPDATE (05/02/2025) - A new Broadcom KB (395322) has also just been published with additional endpoints for troubleshooting download tokens.

Note: For customers that have setup or are using an offline method to retrieve updates, there are no changes in your workflow, this is only for those pulling software update directly from Broadcom.

A Broadcom download token is scoped to a SiteID and depending on your organization you may have one or more SiteIDs and users can generate a unique download token for each SiteID. It is important to understand that a download token itself does not contain an expiration, while you can revoke an existing token, its validity is based on whether a given SiteID has an active entitlement for the particular VMware SKU that you are attempting to download.

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