Blog Date: October 2025

It’s that time to give the home lab a big refresh, and purchase new hardware for VMware Cloud Foundation sandbox. As a VMware employee, I had access to internal labs that I could quickly spin up if I needed to test something with VCF. With every software company purchase, Broadcom has spun off the majority if not all of their newly acquired Professional Services division, and VMware was no different. Now back in Partner life, I needed to reinvest in my home lab. VMware Cloud Foundation is and expensive investment for customers, and as it turns out, it is not cheap for the home lab either lol.

Taking inspiration from William Lam’s VCF 9.0 Hardware BOM for Silicon Valley VMUG, I have modeled my VCF home lab BOM in a similar way.

QTY	Item Description	Link	Total Price
4	MINISFORUM MS-A2 AMD Ryzen™ 9 9955HX / Barebone	MINISFORUM.com	$3,516.00 + warranty $359.96 = $3,875.96
4	10Gtek 𝟭.𝟮𝟱/𝟮.𝟱/𝟱/𝟭𝟬𝗚-𝗧 𝗦𝗙𝗣+ 𝘁𝗼 𝗥𝗝𝟰𝟱, CAT.6a Copper Transceiver, Auto-Negotiation SFP+ Ethernet Module dual kit	Amazon.com	$152
4	Boot Drive: Kingston KC3000 M.2 2280 512GB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe 3D TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SKC3000S/512G	Newegg.com	$283.36
4	NVMe Tiering: SAMSUNG 990 EVO SSD 1TB, PCIe Gen 4×4, Gen 5×2 M.2 2280 NVMe	Amazon.com	$319.96
4	vSAN ESA: SAMSUNG 990 EVO SSD 2TB, PCIe Gen 4×4, Gen 5×2 M.2 2280 NVMe	Amazon.com	$479.96
4	Memory: 128GB Kit (2x64GB) DDR5 5600MHz C46 SODIMM kit	BestBuy.com	$1,831.16

Total = $6,942.4

Your tax and shipping costs may vary. I am still looking for 10G switch, rack, and rack mount hit for these to keep things tidy. I expect my total costs to come in under 8K USD. I’ll update this blog with the additional hardware when it comes in.