VCF 9 Fleet Planning Sizer

After several VCF design sessions—navigating management domains, ESA policies, and the new core-based licensing—one thing became clear: we have plenty of docs, but we need more interactive clarity. I built the VCF 9 Fleet Planning Sizer (ESA Only) to help architects model environments quickly.

🔷 VCF 9 Fleet Planning Sizer (ESA Only)

👉 Try it here: https://sizer.vmtechie.blog/

This is an independent planning calculator designed to help architects model:

• Infrastructure VM footprint (Supervisor, Edge, etc.)
• Management Domain sizing
• Multiple Workload Domains
• ESA storage behavior
• DRR (Dedup × Compression realism)
• Failure domain modeling (0 / N+1 / N+2)
• Core-based licensing visibility
• vSAN entitlement vs raw consumption

Why I Built This Tool

Designing VCF 9 isn’t just about adding up VMs. It’s about navigating the “Triple Constraint”: Compute, ESA Storage, and Licensing. In real architecture discussions, we constantly ask:

• What is actually limiting this cluster?
• CPU, Memory, or Storage?
• How many hosts do we really need?
• What does FTT=2 + RAID-6 really do to capacity?
• Are we oversizing?
• Are we license constrained?
• What happens if I add Supervisor HA?
• What does N-2 failure tolerance mean in practice?

Spreadsheets can answer parts of this, but they don’t show the dynamic interaction between policy, compute, and ESA, This tool tries to do that.

Management Domain Sizing

The calculator starts with:

🔹 Hardware Profile

• CPUs per host
• Cores per CPU
• RAM per host
• NVMe quantity & size
• Minimum host count

🔹 Policy Inputs

• CPU oversubscription
• Memory oversubscription
• Host reserve %
• FTT & RAID policy
• vSAN free space %
• Dedup & compression
• VM Swap Used %
• Failure modeling

How It Calculates Management Hosts

1. Compute usable vCPU per host
2. Compute usable RAM per host
3. Apply reserve factor
4. Compare demand from full Management VM stack
5. Determine limiter (Compute / Memory / Storage)
6. Calculate ESA protected storage requirement
7. Apply failure domain logic
8. Final host count = max(CPU, RAM, Storage, Minimum Hosts)

You immediately see:

• Demand vs Capacity
• Protection Factor
• ESA storage breakdown
• Core licenses required
• Raw TiB consumed

Full Management VM Stack Modeling

The tool includes:

• SDDC Manager
• vCenter
• NSX Manager
• NSX Edge
• AVI
• VCF Operations
• Log Insight
• Network Insight
• Identity
• Custom VMs

Each with T-shirt sizing.

ESA Storage Model

ESA math is often misunderstood,The calculator models:

VM Capacity = (VM disks + infra disks) / DRRSwap = Provisioned RAM × Swap %Interim Total = VM Capacity + SwapProtected = Interim × Protection Factor+ Free Space Reserve+ Growth %Storage Hosts = ceil(total / per-host raw capacity + failures)

Protection Factor examples:

Workload Domains (Where It Gets Interesting)

You can add multiple WLDs.

Each WLD has:

🔹 Tenant Demand

• VM count
• vCPU per VM
• RAM per VM
• Disk per VM
• Growth %

🔹 Policy + Planning

• CPU/Mem oversub
• FTT + RAID
• Reserve %
• Free space %
• Dedup × Compression
• VM Swap Used %
• Failure Domain (0 / N+1 / N+2)

Limiter Visualization + Health Model

Each WLD shows:

• Compute limiter
• Memory limiter
• Storage limiter
• Utilization %
• Health badge:
  • 🟢 Healthy
  • 🟡 Tight
  • 🔵 Oversized

This gives immediate architectural intuition.

Licensing Visibility (Core-Based)

The calculator also models:

• Management core licenses
• Workload core licenses
• Total fleet cores
• Entitlement (1 TiB per core)
• Required add-on capacity

What Makes This Different?

This tool is:

✔ ESA-focused
✔ Policy-aware
✔ Failure-domain realistic
✔ Multi-domain capable
✔ Licensing visible
✔ Architecture-driven

It’s not just math. It reflects real design conversations.

⚠️ Important Disclaimer

This calculator is:

• Independent
• Not an official Broadcom / VMware tool
• Not endorsed by my employer
• Intended as a planning aid only

Always validate against:

• Official documentation
• HCL
• Field engineering guidance

🧑‍💻 Who Is This For?

• VCF Architects
• Cloud Platform Leads
• Infrastructure Engineers
• Pre-sales Architects
• Capacity planners
• Anyone doing ESA-based VCF 9 designs

🚀 Try It

👉 Live here:

https://sizer.vmtechie.blog

If you test it, I’d love feedback

Final Thoughts

Architecture clarity reduces risk.This tool is my contribution to making VCF 9 planning:

More transparent.
More realistic.
More engineer-friendly.