Since the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1, the demand and interests from the community on getting hands on with vSphere with Tanzu and the new simplified networking solution, has been non-stop. Most folks are either upgrading their existing homelab or looking to purchase new hardware that can better support the new features of the vSphere 7.0 release.
Although vSphere with Tanzu now has a flavor that does not require NSX-T which helps reduces the barrier on getting started, it still has some networking requirements which may not be easily met in for all lab environments. In fact, this was actually the primary reason I had started to look into this since my personal homelab network is very basic and I do not have nor want a switch that can support multiple VLANs, which is one of the requirements for vSphere with Tanzu.
While investigating for a potential solution, which included way too MANY hours of debugging and troubleshooting, I also thought about the absolute minimal amount of resources I could get away with after put everything together. To be clear, my homelab is comprised of a single Supermicro E200-8D which has 128GB of memory and that has served me well over the years and I highly recommend it for anyone that can fit that into their budget. With that said, I did set out with a pretty aggressive goal of using something that is pretty common in VMware homelabs which is an Intel NUC and with just 32GB of memory.
UPDATE (07/02/24) - As of vSphere 8.0 Update 3, you no longer have the ability to configure a single Supervisor Control Plane VM using the minmaster and maxmasters parameters, which have also been removed from /etc/vmware/wcp/wcpsvc.yaml in favor of allowing users to control this configuration programmatically as part of enabling vSphere IaaS (formally known as vSphere with Tanzu). The updated vSphere IaaS API that allows users to specify number of Supervisor Control Plane VM will not be available until the next major vSphere release. While this regressed capability is unfortunate, it was also not an officially supported configuration and for users who wish to specify the number of Supervisor Control Plane VM using YAML method, you will need to use an earlier version of vSphere.
