During my own deployment testing of VMware Cloud Foundation 9, and its smaller counterpart VMware vSphere Foundation 9, I came across the need to determine exactly how much space is required if you want to set up an offline depot to install your first fleet member. In offline/airgap or edge locations where connectivity to the internet is either too slow or completely inaccessible VMware provides a great solution to be able to prepare a portable depot which could either be a virtual machine or laptop operating close to where you are going to run the VCF installer.
Previously the Cloud Builder appliance was very large (~27GB) because the image required a lot of space just to store the various files which it will need for the installation. The new combined VMware Cloud Foundation Installer/SDDC Manager .OVA download in VCF 9 replaces this element with a much smaller 2.15GB file because it doesn’t by default include the other components which will be installed later, e.g. VCF Operations, VCF Automation etc.
Instead you can choose to create an offline depot on a laptop or virtual machine and use this to bootstrap the VMware Cloud Foundation Installer with those files instead of having it download everything from the Broadcom site using your download token. This scenario is far more likely in my own experience, as downloading tens of GB when reaching a greenfield site (for any solution) is variously difficult and can take hours.
The product documentation states that the installer appliance requires a minimum of 914GB storage if thick provisioned, but this post will cover what is the bare minimum in order to get a working VM which will deploy the whole VCF suite.
Doing it the William Lam way
William Lam has several excellent articles which describe the process of (1) enabling a simple HTTP server using Python which will serve the files that are imported into the SDDC Manager when it is first deployed, and (2) these will be useful in setting up a depot (perhaps you’ll use a VMUG Advantage entitlement to download the files if it’s for a lab environment)
How to deploy VCF 9 using VMUG Advantage licenses: https://williamlam.com/2025/07/how-to-deploy-vvf-vcf-9-0-using-vmug-advantage-vcp-vcf-certification-entitlement.html
Using HTTP protocol to host the depot files: https://williamlam.com/2025/06/using-http-with-vcf-9-0-installer-for-offline-depot.html
Creating a simple Python web server: https://williamlam.com/2025/01/quick-tip-easily-host-vmware-cloud-foundation-vcf-offline-depot-using-python-simplehttpserver-with-authentication.html
Disable 10Gbit ethernet adapter speed check: https://williamlam.com/2025/06/disable-10gbe-nic-pre-check-in-the-vcf-9-0-installer.html
How much space?!
However rather than duplicating any of this above guidance, this post concentrates on exactly how much space you’ll need for either a VCF 9 or VVF 9 based offline-depot, ideally stored on a laptop or virtual machine acting as a web server. It could be costly in disk space terms to host these files permanently on your laptop, but there’s no reason why you can’t use an external SSD for this purpose – the question is what size will I need?
Also worth considering is where you’re going to put the VCF Installer virtual machine when you’re getting ready to bootstrap a vSAN environment. In this case you’ll need to find a VMFS datastore which is large enough for the installer plus the data which will be imported into the VM itself. The rest of your disks are probably going to be cleared of any partitions so you can’t use those to store data.
A fully populated offline depot which is capable of serving both VVF and VCF products to the SDDC Manager will require ~56GB on disk when combined with the other parts of the depot. The thin provisioned VM will use approximately 80GB when the offline-depot files have been uploaded to it, so if you’ve got a VMFS partition on a 250GB SSD or NVMe disk that is local to your ESXi server this should be sufficient to hold the installer VM before you eventually migrate it to vSAN.
Here’s how the space breaks down into the two products, each is neatly defined within the user interface of the VMware Cloud Foundation Installer:
VMware vSphere Foundation 9
You will need a total of 16.67GB free space to store the three files (.ova and .iso) comprising the three elements stored in the offline-depot.
VMware Cloud Foundation 9
You will need a total of 52GB free space to store the nine files (.ova, .tar, .vlcm and .iso) comprising the seven application elements stored in the offline-depot.
So there you have it, the whole VVF/VCF stack can be installed from these binaries using the VMware Cloud Foundation Installer, and the only element that you’ll need to install onto your target ESXi server initially is the 2GB installer VM (which can optionally become the actual SDDC Manager for the cluster once complete).
| Product name | Fully populated depot size |
| VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) | ~16GB |
| VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) | ~56GB |
