Getting your hands on the actual software is the step nobody writes enough about. The Broadcom Support Portal is functional but it’s not exactly intuitive, especially if you’re coming from the old my.vmware.com experience. This post covers what you need, where to find it, and what the licensing actually looks like for a VVF deployment so you’re not guessing.
What VVF Actually Gives You
VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) is a subscription that bundles vSphere, vSAN, and a base tier of Aria Operations into a single per-core licence. It’s the lighter-weight alternative to the full VCF stack — you get the compute and storage layers without the SDDC Manager automation framework and the prescriptive bringup process.
For a lab, this is actually the more sensible starting point. You’re not deploying 4 management hosts, running a JSON bringup, and waiting two hours for the installer to validate everything. You deploy ESXi, deploy vCenter, configure vSAN yourself, and you’re done. Much faster to iterate on.
What you get with a VVF subscription licence:
- ESXi (included, no separate hypervisor licence needed)
- vCenter Server (included)
- vSAN (included — both OSA and ESA capable)
- Aria Operations base tier (included, though in a lab you may not bother deploying it)
What you don’t get: NSX, VCF Automation, or SDDC Manager. If you need those, that’s the VCF stack, not VVF.
Getting a Licence
For a home lab, your options are:
A paid VVF subscription. This is per core, per year. For a lab running on a single physical host, this adds up quickly. Worth it if your employer subsidises lab expenses or if you’re studying for a VCP/VCAP exam and need the real thing.
An NFR (Not for Resale) licence. Available through certain partner programmes. If you work for a VMware/Broadcom partner, check with your partner administrator — NFR licences are often available and are fully functional for lab use.
A trial licence. Broadcom offers a 60-day evaluation through the Support Portal. It’s a real licence with full functionality. Enough time to build the lab, break things, fix them, and document what you learned.
Whichever route you take, the licence key ends up in your Broadcom Support Portal account under My Entitlements.
Navigating the Broadcom Support Portal
Go to support.broadcom.com and log in. If you don’t have an account, create one — it’s free, and you need it regardless of whether you’re using a trial or a paid licence.
The portal layout trips people up the first time. Here’s where things live:
Downloads. Top navigation → VMware Cloud Foundation → My Downloads. Search for “vSphere Foundation” and you’ll see the download bundles. The main things you need are the ESXi ISO and the VMware vCenter Server Appliance ISO. They’re listed separately.
Licence Keys. Top navigation → My Account → My Entitlements. Your licence keys are listed here by product. Copy the VVF key — you’ll need it when you licence vCenter and ESXi after deployment.
One thing that confused me when I first used the portal: the download filenames don’t always make it obvious which version you’re getting. Always check the release date and the build number in the file description before downloading. The portal lists multiple patch levels for the same major version, and you want the most recent one unless you have a specific reason to go older.
What to Download
You need two ISOs:
ESXi ISO. The standard VMware-ESXi ISO file. Around 400 MB. This is what you’ll boot from (or use to create a bootable USB) to install ESXi on your physical host. In a nested lab scenario, this is also the image your nested VMs boot from — though for nested deployment you’ll typically use William Lam’s nested ESXi OVA rather than installing from ISO.
VMware vCenter Server Appliance ISO. This is a large file — typically 8–9 GB. The ISO contains a GUI installer that runs on your workstation and deploys the vCenter appliance OVA to a target ESXi host. Download this to the machine you’ll run the installer from, not to the server.
That’s genuinely all you need for a basic VVF lab. No separate vSAN download, no NSX installer, no additional licensing files. The vSAN capability is built into ESXi and activated through the VVF licence key.
Hardware Prerequisites
For a physical host running a nested VVF lab, the minimums that actually work in practice:
CPU. Any Intel or AMD processor from the last six or seven years will work. For nested ESXi to run properly, you need hardware virtualisation extensions exposed — Intel VT-x or AMD-V, enabled in the BIOS. Most modern processors have these on by default, but if your nested VMs refuse to power on with a CPU compatibility error, check your BIOS virtualisation settings first.
RAM. This is the real constraint. A three-node nested VVF cluster with vCenter needs a minimum of around 96 GB of RAM on the physical host to run without constant memory pressure. Each nested ESXi host needs at least 16 GB, plus vCenter needs 14 GB in Tiny mode, plus whatever VMs you plan to run on top. If you have 64 GB in your physical host, you can make it work but you’ll be trimming things close.
Storage. vSAN requires dedicated disk capacity separate from the ESXi boot device. For a nested lab, you’re presenting virtual disks to nested hosts, so your physical host just needs enough raw storage to back those virtual disks. A rough guide: plan for around 1 TB of usable physical storage to give three nested nodes with reasonable vSAN capacity.
Network. At least one physical NIC. For a full lab with proper VLAN separation (management, vMotion, vSAN, workloads), a 10GbE NIC makes a noticeable difference, but 1GbE will work for a low-throughput lab. If you’re running the lab on a single physical NIC, you’ll trunk all your VLANs across it, which is fine for a nested environment.
Network Prerequisites
Before you touch the ESXi installer, you should have a few things sorted on your network:
VLAN design. How you’re separating management, vMotion, vSAN, and workload traffic. For the VVF Lab series, the design is covered in Part 1 — but the short version is that you want at minimum a management VLAN and a vSAN VLAN. vMotion can share with management in a pinch, but separating it is cleaner.
Static IP addresses. Reserve IPs for your physical ESXi host management interface, each nested ESXi host, and vCenter. These need to be stable — DHCP for lab infrastructure causes intermittent problems that are tedious to debug. Reserve them in your DHCP server by MAC, or just configure them statically.
DNS. Forward and reverse DNS for every hostname you plan to use. The minimum entries you need before starting: one A record and PTR record for vCenter, one A record and PTR record for each nested ESXi host. I manage this with a bind9 server running on a Raspberry Pi on my management VLAN — it takes about 20 minutes to set up and saves hours of mysterious installer failures later.
Once you have the software downloaded, the licence key copied, and the network prerequisites in place, you’re ready to start the actual deployment.