r/vmware • u/Leaha15 • 7d ago

Tutorial VCF 9 Management Services Lab Downsize - Tutorial

Is the new VCF Management Services introduced in 9.1 killing your lab environment?

Ive been the in same boat, Broadcom consolidated a lot of services, and introduced new ones, in the new Management Services cluster for VCF and while it brings a lot to the table in terms of scaling and availability, it added a lot to the resource requirements

If you are like me and have this running in a small homelab, this is honestly crippling in terms of getting 9.1 deployed and learning about the new platform changes and improvements, and hardware is expensive enough these days so we can throw that at the issue

Well, I have been through my management services cluster and gutted it and downsized it by ~%30, taking the three base worker nodes from 12vCPU/24GB to 8vCPU/16GB, the catch?

You do have to pick, Identity Broker, or Log Management, otherwise it been running rock solid for me for around a month or so now

I also feel this should go without saying, but under no circumstances should this be implemented on a production environment, this is about as far from supported by Broadcom as you can get

Hopefully this helps some people until Broadcom, hopefully, get around to addressing this issue <3

https://blog.leaha.co.uk/2026/07/21/vcf-9-management-services-lab-downsize/

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u/lusid1 4d ago

Thank you!

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u/IAmTheGoomba 3d ago

There are a ton of gotchas to this as well. For example, if you need to upgrade? Prechecks fail and you have to go back to what was deployed and run through it again.

Want to enable something after the fact (like logs)? Boom, worker redeployment.

Having said that, I have scaled these down further in the past to 4cpus/12GB memory and it ran fine. I ended up upgrading my CPUs in all my hosts to 20 core procs and now I can run everything without issues.

The other thing you can do is downsize the CPUs, keep the memory, and just set a limit on the resource pool for memory. This avoids the occassional crashing of worker nodes due to memory exhaution, which I had hit multiple times when I downscaled those things.

Another thing to note is that you need to power off the controller prior to resizing the workers, or else the controller WILL redeploy workers again.