VMware Cloud Foundation "in a box" - Holodeck Homelab Build

After parting with a small Supermicro Homelab in 2022 and having some time away from running my own kit I decided it was time to re-invest and get ready for the incoming VCF v9 release in 2025.

Until version 9 of Cloud Foundation is out of beta and widely available I plan to run the Single host 5.x VCF Holodeck implementation along with some legacy versions when needed to assist me in my day job.

My hardware build was inspired by and closely follows a fellow colleagues current setup, the details of which can be found here

The Hardware Bill Of Materials

Motherboard - Supermicro H12SSL-i Single Socket SP3 As this whole environment was being built to be nested I went for the "i" variant of this great motherboard, this saved a little money by sacrificing the 10Gb networking and provided 2 onboard 1GB Nics, if 10GB is needed further down the line I can add a compatible PCI card at that point. This variant of the motherboard also provided both onboard SATA connections and a single slimline SAS connection for storage, again i though this option gave the most flexibility for future storage should I need it

CPU - AMD EPYC 7513 (32 cores @ 2.60GHz) Enough performance without breaking the bank, used chips can be found for £400-600 and with a 200W TDP means it isn't too heavy on power consumption, also this is currently allowing me to run with an older 550W PSU, the first sign of any issues and I'll likely jump to something around the 750W mark.

CPU Fan Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3 This beast of a cooler is specific to the AMD TR4 and SP3 footprint (I think its also available for other CPU's) it was a squeeze to get this in to my case but the side when on perfectly with just enough clearance, as for cooling its super quiet and does a very good job in conjunction with the two case fans. One word of warning, if fully populating all the RAM slots you many need to remove and re-position the fan from the cooling block as it could catch the tops of the closest RAM sticks, this was relatively easy to do by removing the steel retainer clip and ensuring the fan sits a touch higher with adequate clearance.

RAM - 8 x Micron 64GB 3200MHz ECC Registered DDR4 Probably the most expensive part of this build, the highest speed the motherboard will take is 3200MHz, I went for 8 x 64GB to give 512GB in total, with the new memory tiering in ESXi 8.0U3 you may be able to supplement a lower amount of RAM with a decent NVMe drive and lower the cost substantially. As for where to buy, Ebay seems to be the best option here, offering the lowest prices I could find, yes there is some risk but I managed to save several hundred pounds off the retail price of new sticks doing it this way.

Storage - 2 x 4TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 PCIe 4.0 Installed two of these NVMe drives into the onboard M.2 Slots, also added a couple of heatsinks to help with the temps, super fast and reliable, I also have some secondary SDD and slower NVMe storage, this will be used for ISOs and install files mainly along with any VMs that are none VCF related.

Power Supply - reused old Corsair RM550w, this has been ok so far, this will be monitored and uprated in the future should it be required

Case - reused old be quiet pure base 600 with 140mm fan at the front and 120mm fan at the rear.

Some Pictures of the results - extra ram and additional NVMe drive not present as I was awaiting delivery of these at the time of the initial build.

So far I have been impressed with the performance, cooling and power usage of this build, I can hardly hear it went its on and it has so far been able to run a 4 node nested VCF deployment including all the trimmings with ease.

have yet to push it harder and deploy a separate workload domain but cannot see it struggling, I do not plan to run any heavy sort of workloads on the environment as its purely for testing and proof of concept work.

Future improvements may include... potential PSU upgrade, 10GB nic upgrade if required and some form of low cost backup solution for any components that are not easily rebuildable, Veeam community edition may suffice here.

Look out for the next couple of blog where I will be detailing the deployment of a custom VCF Build using the build scripts available from William Lam here and also how to deploy the latest version of VCF and all components using holodeck.

If you made it this far thanks for reading and I hope this helped !