#LAB MASTER SUPERMIC UPDATE#

192.168.30.20-192.168.30.25) will be needed for the Supervisor Control Plane VMsДЄs part of this solution, I have automated as much of the tasks as possible and all scripts used for this solution can be found at which I will be referencing throughout the instructions. 5 x IP Addresses in a consecutive block (e.g.4 x IP Addresses which should map to following hostnames or similiar.9 x IP Addresses in total will be required from your local LAN network.1 x Photon OS Linux VM used as a Router for IP forwarding and optionally, a DNS server if you do not already have one.1 x HAProxy VM deployed using 3-NIC configuration.1 x vSphere with Tanzu Cluster enabled with Workload Management.

3 x Distributed Portgroups will be configured on top of your existing LAN network, the latter two will be routed through our Photon OS Router VM.

Onboard NIC will be used for all traffic and will be attached to a Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS).

VMFS storage will be used instead of vSAN to reduce memory footprint (If you have 64GB of memory, recommend using vSAN).

1 x vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) running on the Intel NUC self-managing the ESXi host.

The final solution will comprise of the following: Note: The Intel NUCs (Gen 6 to 10) can all support up to 64GB of memory and this is one of the best upgrades you can give yourself, but if you only have 32GB of memory, this will also work.

#LAB MASTER SUPERMIC UPDATE#

vCenter Server Appliance 7.0 Update 1 Build 16860138.

NUC can support two SSD (M.2 + SATA), you can always go larger.

Here is the hardware BOM (similar hardware should also work): 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.ДЄlthough 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. 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.

Lab master supermic