I thought this might have been common knowledge, but after chatting with a VMware colleague who recently rebuilt his home lab, I realized it may not be the case. The vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) is distributed as a virtual appliance and by default it is configured for 8GB of memory. However, this is definitely NOT the "minimum" amount of memory required to have a fully functional vCenter Server.

It looks like some people are just downloading the vCenter Server appliance and just sticking with the defaults of 8GB of memory which for a home lab is quite a large footprint, especially given you will probably want to install other virtual machines. The actual minimum for vCenter Server (Windows or Linux) is just 4GB and technically speaking, you can even get away with just 3GB for the vCenter Server Appliance (anything less, the system is extremely slow and unusable).

Here is a quick screenshot showing vCenter Server Appliance running with only 3GB of memory:

VMware also has a KB article detailing the minimum requirements for the vCenter Server Appliance based on the number of virtual machines and hosts you plan on running. For my home lab, I normally stick with the 4GB of memory and I have not had any issues. Hopefully this tip will help you save some memory for either your lab or even production environment for other workloads.