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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.

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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vCenter Identity Federation with Authelia

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Gotta catch them all!? 😂

Looks like I will be adding another identity provider to my existing collection of IdPs (Authentik, KeyCloak, Synology SSO, Pocket ID, Zitadel and Kanidm) that can be used with vCenter Server and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Identity Federation.

Authelia is another free and self-hosted IdP solution, which also supports Time-based one-time password (TOTP) out of the box and all configurations are managed in a couple of configuration files as there is no administrative web UI.

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