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Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0

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Since the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you may have seen a few blogs from me 😅

To help folks digest all the resources for deploying and running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 in a lab environment, I have put this blog post together to summarize the various considerations and/or tweaks that will allow you to get the full experience of VCF 9.0 for non-production/commercial usage.

Make sure you to bookmark this page as I will continue to add new updates, I still have a number of backlog items to share ... but for now that will have to wait as I am in need of some PTO, which starts tomorrow! 😎

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NVMe Tiering with Nested Virtualization in VCF 9.0

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The NVMe Tiering feature was first previewed with the release of vSphere 8.0 Update 3 and the feature is now officially supported with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0! 🎉

Since the original tech preview, all major limitations and unsupported workload profiles that would prevent an organization from deploying NVMe Tiering in production has been resolved as part of the VCF 9.0 release.

Although Nested Virtualization is NOT officially supported, many users rely on Nested ESXi for testing, development, and learning purposes. With that said, if you have NVMe Tiering enabled on an ESXi 9.0 host and you attempt to power on a Nested ESXi VM or VM that is configured with Virtual Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV), it will fail to power on with the following error message as shown in the screenshot below.


While it was possible to use Nested ESXi with the tech preview of NVMe Tiering, it was just not in scope as part of productizing NVMe Tiering for VCF 9.0.

All hope is not lost, while Nested Virtualization is still NOT officially supported by Broadcom, it is a very useful feature not just for our users but also for internal development purposes and after speaking with the tech lead for NVMe Tiering, this is something that will be addressed in a future update of VCF and this is just a short term limitation for now if you intend to run Nested ESXi workloads.

ESXi on GMKtec NucBox K11

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The GMKtec NucBox has been growing in popularity amongst the VMware community as a modern AMD Ryzen-based alternative to the Intel/ASUS NUC, offering many of the same advantages while avoiding some of the drawbacks of Intel's Hybrid CPU architecture.

In preparation for my upcoming session at the inaugural VMUG Connect Conference in April, I have been experimenting with several modern hardware options, with the goal of deploying the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution for use within a lab environment, while still staying budget friendly!

I know several folks have had great success with the GMKtec NucBox K8 Plus and it just so happens, while browsing the GMKtec website, I noticed an additional NucBox has just been released called the K11.


While the differences between the K8 Plus and K11 is pretty minimal, I was interested in validating some new hardware add-ons, so getting the latest hardware would hopefully give me the best chance!

In collaboration with the VMware {Code} team, I was able to get hands on with the latest GMKtec NucBox K11!

UPDATE (06/25/25) - The K11 can be used to run VCF 9.0, but you will NOT be able to run VCF Automation (VCFA). You can see how I have used the K11 is used in a "Hybrid" configuration in this blog post under Scenario 3.

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