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Updated Inventory & Calculator Scripts for counting Cores/TiBs for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF)

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Here are two new tools to help our users understand and calculate the required subscription capacity for the new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) offerings, which are licensed based on physical CPU Cores for compute and total raw physical storage (TiBs) for vSAN.

Inventory Script

The PowerCLI script provided in KB 95927 is designed to help users inventory their existing vSphere environment (read-only account is sufficient) to assess the required VCF or VVF subscription capacity for compute and/or vSAN. The script has also been enhanced to incorporate the upcoming 100GiBs of vSAN storage entitlement for each VVF core that is provisioned to a vSAN cluster as well as the latest pricing and packaging for both VCF and VVF. For more details on how to download and use the inventory script, please check out the KB for more information.

Note: Make sure you are using the latest version of the script which had a minor update on 02/14/2024

Calculator Script

The PowerShell script provided in KB 96426 is designed to help users run different simulations for calculating the required VCF or VVF subscription capacity for compute and/or vSAN, especially in planning for a new or greenfield deployment. For customers who can not run the inventory script from KB 95927 due to organizational policies, the calculator script can be a viable alternative as long as you can manually provide the required parameters via the CSV input file used by the script. For more details on how to download and use the calculator script, please check out the KB for more information.


If you still have questions or require further assistance on sizing or pricing (including all applicable discounts), please reach out to your local VMware account team and they will be more than happy to help.

Get notified when VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Bringup has completed

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While updating and testing my Automated Lab Deployment Script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), I often found myself checking whether the bringup process has completed or not using the Cloud Builder UI.


Ideally, I could configure some type of notification that would alert me immediately when the deployment has finished or if it ran into an issue and has failed.

Since Cloud Builder is just a Photon OS VM, that gave me an idea for a quick workaround ... 🤔

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Automated Lab Deployment Script updated to support VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1

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I finally got some time to update my Automated VMware Cloud Foundation Lab (VCF) Deployment script to support the latest VCF 5.1 release as this has been requested by a number of folks both internally and externally.

In addition to updating some of the new resource requirements such as increasing the Nested ESXi vSAN capacity drive from 60GB to 100GB, I was also thinking about some of the feedback that I had received internally from one of our engineers and that gave me some ideas on how to further stream the deployment using automation. I also came up with a few new ideas that I have added to the script, some of which I will cover in a future blog post 😁


The first thing you will notice is that you can now specify the number of ESXi hosts to deploy both for the VCF Management Domain as well as for a Workload Domain.

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