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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Homelab Hardware Options

12.05.2024 by William Lam // 9 Comments

I have been getting a ton of inquiries lately, both internally as well as externally for hardware recommendations for building a new or updating an existing homelab/test environment to be able to deploy the full VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution. I typically receive at least half a dozen inquiries per week about general VMware Homelabs, but it has increased in volume lately, perhaps it was due to the recent US Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales or perhaps some are preparing for VCF 9 already?

In any case, I normally point users to my crowdsourced VMware Community Homelab Project, where users can submit their hardware build-of-materials (BOM), overall cost and the VMware solutions they are currently using.


While the VMware Community Homelab Project has been running for several years now and has helped numerous users, the majority of the submissions typically focus on subset of the VMware portfolio and only handful of submissions have included VCF and more importantly, some of the submissions are several years old.

Internally, a number of folks have shared more recent BOMs for building an environment to run the latest VCF 5.x release and I have also found several folks outside of VMware doing the same, so I thought it would be useful and timely to aggregate some of their hardware configurations to help give users an idea of what works and options as they are looking to revamp their lab going into 2025.

[Read more...]

Categories // Home Lab, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation

Interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2024

10.30.2024 by William Lam // 22 Comments

Where did 2024 go!? I can not believe there is only a few more months left before the end of the year!

During VMware Explore US, I had several folks ask whether I was going to publish a 2024 edition of my annual interesting VMware homelab kit blog post, simliar to HERE and HERE for 2023 and 2023 respectively. While I had planned for this originally, I was pretty busy this year and getting hands on with some of the latest Intel 14th Generation systems did not happen until much later and hence why I had not put anything together.

I was recently reminded of this request again and it feels like the right time to summarize the various kits that I have come across and/or have gotten hands on throughout the year.

Homelab Trends

There are also some interesting trends that I have observed in 2024, especially as it pertains to VMware Homelabs/Development/Testing purposes:

  • The support for non-binary DDR5 SODIMM memory modules has become the new norm and can enable small form factor systems to get up to 96GB of memory
  • Intel 14th (Consumer) CPU introduces a third core type (LPE) into its Hybrid architecture which has some implications as mentioned in my review of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro as an example
  • Having more M.2 NVMe or general NVMe slots will be extremely advantageous with the introduction of vSphere NVMe Memory Tiering capability
  • OCuLink supported peripherals, especially for external GPU and storage is slowly becoming a reality after its initial introduction in 2012 and may finally give Thunderbolt some competition

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // homelab

ESXi on ASUS NUC 14 Performance (Scorpion Canyon)

10.15.2024 by William Lam // 2 Comments

In addition to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro (which I recently reviewed), ASUS has also released the ASUS NUC 14 Performance (formally known as Scorpion Canyon) as part of their Intel 14th Generation (Meteor Lake) lineup.


Compared to the ASUS NUC 14 Pro and Pro+, the ASUS NUC 14 Performance offers more powerful CPU options and an additional NVIDIA discrete (mobile) graphics that can be used for a variety of use cases and workloads including the hot topic of AL/ML exploration.

Thanks to the SimplyNUC team who provided me access to the ASUS NUC 14 Performance kit for this review! Let's dive right in 😀

UPDATE (02/20/25) - 128GB (2x64GB) DDR5 SODIMM memory is fully functional with PN64-E1, please see this blog post for more information.

[Read more...]

Categories // ESXi, Home Lab Tags // ASUS, ESXi, NUC

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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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