I’ve been testing VCF fleet deployments on different hardware I have. This is due to the VCF Management Services and trying to get VCF Automation deployed. In the following steps I will be deploying a Greenfield VCF Fleet on 2 x Minisforum MS-A2, these are packed with AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX 16-Core Processor (Zen 5). I do have an extra NVMe drive which I will be using for Memory Tiering.

I want to make a shout out to someone from one of our partners that deployed VCF onto a single box, check that out here; Running VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1.1 on One Physical Homelab Node · Devyn Harrington

I have my single VCF Installer instance which is running on my personal Windows desktop on VMware workstation, prepared the hosts with ESX 9.1.1, the usual configurations, set my memory tiering on a single host prior to deployment.

Also, some symptoms when testing this out previously I was experiencing high CPU usage, a single host would max to 100%. During the rebuild, I applied William Lam’s documented workaround which can be found here: https://williamlam.com/2026/09/vcf-9-1-1-reducing-cpu-utilization-on-amd-ryzen-zen4-zen5-by-masking-the-rdseed-instruction.html – Big Thanks for this one as the rebuild I never encountered the high CPU usage.

In the following steps, you will see step-by-step walkthrough of a VCF Fleet Deployment

I will fast track this to starting the deployment from the VCF Installer

Plan

The next few screenshots are the ‘Plan’ section of the deployment; you can see this as a pre-preparation for the installer and what you select here will reflect in your deployment fields that appear.

This will be a new VCF Fleet

If you have an existing vSphere environment along with Aria Operations, this is where you can elect to choose existing components and converge as your first VCF Management Domain.

Right below, is the option for Automation, I will select this box as I choose to deploy later

The following sizing displays Simple; you can select High Availability to understand the amount of resources

For Storage, it will be NFS

Here is a breakdown of resources and requirements to prepare

Prepare

You can see I have a banner warning there are not enough resources for reserves, however it will allow deployment. Added the 2 hosts

First part of the Network configuration will be for ESX & VM Management

The second part of the network section for NFS and NSX

The next one is the VCF Management related information

The second part of VCF Management

I’m electing to go with Default I have 2 x 10GB NICs with vlans trunked.

Next step will be validation, Warnings can be ‘Acknowledged’ and proceed but with caution ofcourse.

The install completed successfully, you can now Review Passwords and use the VCF Installer for anything additional.

The following is the completed inventory on the 2 hosts

Here is my idle Capacity & Usage

Memory Tiering was enabled on a single host, however nothing is being used currently (see Tier 1)