Part 5: VCF Hardware Requirements & Bill of Materials

Hardware Requirements for VCF 9.1

VCF runs on bare-metal server hardware. Before purchasing or repurposing hardware, every component — CPU model, NIC model, SSD/NVMe model, storage controller — must be validated on the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG). Using unsupported hardware is the single most common reason VCF deployments fail or produce unexpected behavior.

Minimum Host Configuration (Management Domain)

The management domain requires a minimum of 4 ESXi hosts. This supports vSAN with FTT=1 (Failure to Tolerate 1 host failure) while still accommodating an ESXi host in maintenance mode.

CPU Requirements

• Minimum: Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake or newer) or AMD EPYC (Naples or newer)
• Minimum cores per socket: 8 physical cores
• Sockets per host: 2 recommended (dual-socket)
• vSAN ESA requirement: AVX-512 instruction set recommended for compression performance
• Hardware virtualization: Intel VT-x / AMD-V must be enabled in BIOS
• IOMMU: Intel VT-d / AMD-Vi required for DirectPath I/O

For production VCF deployments, Intel Xeon Gold/Platinum (Ice Lake, Sapphire Rapids, Emerald Rapids) or AMD EPYC Gen 3/4 are the current mainstream choices. CPU generation matters significantly for vSAN ESA compression performance.

RAM Requirements

• Minimum per host (management domain): 512 GB DDR4/DDR5
• Recommended: 768 GB – 1.5 TB for management domain hosts
• Workload domain hosts: Sized based on VM density; 384 GB is a common minimum for production workload hosts
• Memory speed: DDR4-3200 or DDR5-4800 minimum; higher speeds improve vSAN read cache performance

The management domain consumes significant RAM: SDDC Manager (~20 GB), 3x NSX Manager (~12 GB each), vCenter Server (~19 GB), plus headroom for NSX Edge nodes and optional Aria appliances. Budget at least 100–120 GB of RAM per management domain host for management VMs alone.

Storage Requirements

VCF requires HCI (hyper-converged) storage — the storage runs on the same hosts as the compute. There is no support for external SAN or NAS as the primary vSAN datastore.

vSAN OSA (Original Storage Architecture)

• Cache tier drives: NVMe or SAS/SATA SSD — minimum 1 per disk group, 10% of capacity tier size
• Capacity tier drives: SAS SSD, SATA SSD, or NVMe — minimum 1 per disk group, maximum 7 per disk group
• Disk groups per host: 1–5
• Minimum raw capacity per host: No hard minimum, but 4 TB+ practical minimum for production

vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) — NVMe ONLY

• Storage pools: 1 pool per host (replaces disk groups)
• Drive type: NVMe only (PCIe or U.2 form factor)
• Minimum drives per host: 4 NVMe drives
• Minimum raw capacity per host: 1.6 TB NVMe (practical minimum; 4 TB+ recommended)
• NVMe controller: Must be on VCG for ESA — not all NVMe controllers are ESA-compatible
• ESA performance advantage: 4–8x higher IOPS, 2–4x lower latency vs OSA on equivalent hardware

Boot Device

• Supported: USB flash drive (64 GB minimum), SD card (64 GB minimum), M.2 SATA/NVMe (for ESXi boot partition)
• Recommended: M.2 NVMe or M.2 SATA dedicated for ESXi boot — USB and SD card reliability is lower in production environments
• NOT supported: Booting ESXi from a SAN LUN (deprecated in vSphere 8)

Network Requirements

VCF networking requirements are strict. NIC bandwidth directly impacts vSAN and NSX TEP performance.

Physical NIC (pNIC) Requirements

• Minimum per host: 2x 25 GbE NICs (or 2x 10 GbE for small/lab environments)
• Recommended for production: 2x 25 GbE or 2x 100 GbE NICs
• NIC vendor support: Intel, Broadcom (formerly Qlogic/Emulex), Mellanox (NVIDIA) — check VCG for exact model support
• NIC configuration: Two pNICs per host, each on separate vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) uplinks — active/active teaming for resiliency

Top-of-Rack (ToR) Switch Requirements

• MTU: Jumbo frames (MTU 9000) must be configured end-to-end on vSAN and NSX TEP VLANs
• Spanning Tree: PortFast / BPDU Guard on all host uplink ports (no STP convergence delays)
• LACP: Not required; VCF uses active/active teaming at the VDS level
• BGP: Required on ToR switches if NSX T0 Gateway uses BGP for uplinks (recommended for production)

Minimum VCF Deployment — Full BOM Example

Broadcom Documentation

• VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG)
• VCF 9.1 Host Requirements
• VCF 9.1 Network Requirements
• VCF 9.1 Storage Requirements