To prepare your nested environment for VMware Cloud Foundation 3.0. You will need to create four virtual machines, I use the following names: sfo01m01esx01, sfo01m01esx02, sfo01m01esx03, and sfo01m01esx04. Configure each virtual machine with the settings below.
Virtual Machine Settings
CPU: Set the CPU of each VM to 8, Cores per Socket should also be 8 to reduce vCenter Licensing. Note: VMware Cloud Foundation Requires 8 vCPUs, the installation will fail without at least 8 vCPUs.
You also need to check the Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS option.
Memory: The first ESXi virtual machine (sfo01m01esx01) requires 80GB of memory. This server requires more memory because it is used to bootstrap the environment. You can use 24GB for the remaining hosts. When using 24GB only 16.18GB is available for VMs when using 32GB 23GB is available for VMs. You need enough memory to satisfy the reservation of the NSX Manager virtual machine which requires 16GB.
Disk: Each VM will need three Hard Disks: Hard Disk 1: 16GB (ESXi Installation); Hard Disk 2: 30GB (vSAN Caching Tier); Hard Disk 3: 300GB (vSAN Capacity Tier). You may wish to use Thin Provisioning on each of these disks to conserve disk space.
Thin Provisioning uses 436GB of Disk Space, whereas Thick Provisioning Lazy Zeroed uses 1579GB of Disk Space.
Network: Each VM will need two Network Adapters, connect both of them to DPortGroup
CD/DVD Drive 1: Make sure that you have connected the ESXi Installer ISO before saving your changes. VMware Cloud Foundation requires VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-Update2-8294253.