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VMware Cloud Foundation with a single ESXi host for Management Domain?

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By default, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) requires a minimum of 4 ESXi hosts to construct the Management Domain which is fine for a production environment, but it can be a challenge for those interested in explore VCF in a homelab setting.

I recently came to learn about a really cool tidbit from one of our VCF Engineers on how you can actually deploy a VCF Management Domain using just a single ESXi host, ideal for a homelab setup! ?


Not only could this benefit users in deploying a physical VCF setup but it would also benefit anyone using my Automated Lab Deployment Script for VCF, which makes it super easy by leveraging my Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance VMs.


In fact, that was how I quickly verified this trick works using my VCF automation script 😀

The way that this work is a configuration change to Cloud Builder to tell it to allow a single ESXi host to be used and it will simply setup a single node vSAN Cluster, which is typically how you would bootstrap if you were doing a greenfield deployment. The only difference here is that instead of adding additional 3 x ESXi hosts to provide redundancy for Management Domain, it simply is relaxing that requirement and thus allowing for a single ESXi host. vSAN is still a requirement for VCF Management Domain, so ensure you can meet those requirements still.

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Quick Tip - Additional NVMe vendors (SK Hynix & Sabrent) for ESXi homelab

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The Samsung 980 Pro NVMe is a pretty popular SSD model that is used by many within the VMware Homelab Community. However, in recent months, there have been an alarming amount of reports from owners that their 980 Pro NVMe devices have been failing prematurely due to firmware issues.

Samsung has finally acknowledge the problem with a firmware fix and it looks like a simliar fix is also planned for the Samsung 990 Pro NVMe.

While I can not comment on the specific issues with the Samsung 980/990 Pro NVMe devices, I have had my own failures with cheaper Samsung M.2 NVMe devices where I lost my vSAN setup since I only had a single vSAN diskgroup comprised of single cache and capacity SSD for my homelab. While not ideal, this is to be expected since I had no redundancy and consumer hardware can and will fail over time. I ended upgrading both of my SSDs to a Samsung 970 Plus, which luckily is not affected by the firmware issues.

I typically recommend Samsung, Intel and Western Digital NVMe devices as they typically just work with ESXi, especially for homelab purposes where cost is one of the factors. From some of the online posts that I have read about the current Samsung 980/990 Pro issues, it seems that many have lost faith in Samsung and some have even stated that they will no longer consider Samsung for storage purchases.

This was also a simliar sentiment when I recently spoke with a fellow VMware colleague who was also impacted by the firmware issues. As part of our discussion, he had shared a couple of alternative vendors that he has is now using and recommending for his VMware Homelab setup which also includes vSAN. I thought this was good information that could also benefit folks in the community looking for other storage options.

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How to bootstrap ESXi compute only node and connect to vSAN HCI Mesh?

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After documenting the process for bootstrapping vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) using my Intel NUC 12 Pro, I was looking for an easier way to share my physical vSAN storage, which is powered by a single Supermicro E200-8D, to other physical ESXi hosts for testing purposes.

I had recently been playing with the vSAN HCI Mesh feature, which was launched back in 2020, as I was running out of spare NVMe devices when needing to test different physical hardware kits. While my use case for the storage is typically short lived, it means I do not have to play musical chairs with the limited number of NVMe devices I have installed in the various kits I have.

The vSphere UI in vCenter Server already provides a very simple workflow to mount a remote vSAN storage on an ESXi compute-only node, but I was also looking at this from a bootstrapping point of view and what if vCenter Server was not deployed or even available? Could I still make this work? After a bit of trial and error, I was able to figure out this can be accomplished by using a series of ESXCLI commands!

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