I know many of you have been asking about the hardware setup that we had used in this years VMworld Hackathon. I finally got a chance to document the details and you can find the complete hardware and software BOM below. For VMworld US, we had two different HW configurations, one for the primary Hackathon which was also re-used for VMworld Europe but we also had another configuration for the Hackathon Training sessions which was new this year. For VMworld Europe, we re-used the primary Hackathon hardware, but we also had the opportunity to take advantage of the new VMware Cloud on AWS offering and built a similiar configuration that teams could also remotely connect to as well. The only difference between the on-premises hardware and VMWonAWS, is the latter required users to RDP to a Windows jump host. Both options were provided and teams could select either environment to use.

Note: Internally, CDW is one of our vendors for purchasing hardware/software and that is why there are links directly to their site. However, you may find better pricing by looking online, especially Amazon which majority of the components are cheaper except for the server which you can get an exclusive vGhetto Discount at MITXPC. I have added links to both CDW/Amazon where applicable and I recommend doing research to find the best pricing if you are on a budget.

Here is a picture of the setup at VMworld US:



Here is a picture of the setup at VMworld EU:

Hackathon Setup:

6 x Supermicro E200-8D (6 Node vSAN Cluster)

24 x 32GB memory (128GB per system)

6 x 250GB NVMe for vSAN Caching

6 x 1TB SSD for vSAN Capacity

6 x USB keys for ESXi Install

Cost per System: $2,929.92 (based on CDW pricing)

Hackathon Hardware BOM:

Hackathon Training Setup:

4 x Supermicro E200-8D (1 per training session)

16 x 16GB memory (64GB per system)

4 x 250GB NVMe for vSAN Caching

4 x 1TB SSD for vSAN Capacity

4 x USB keys for ESXi Install

Cost per System: $2,049.92 (based on CDW pricing)

Hackathon Training Hardware BOM:

Sofware BOM US:

Here is a screenshot of the Hackathon environment via the vSphere Client:



Sofware BOM EU:

In addition to the on-premises hardware/software configuration that was used for both VMworld US and Europe, we also had an additional environment that was available exclusively for VMworld Europe. We were able to leverage the new VMware Cloud on AWS offering and built a similiar configuration that teams could remotely connect to as well. Below is a screenshot of the VMWonAWS SDDC which has the exact same configuration in terms of the vPods that were built and the only difference is that it lives in the Cloud and teams would have to RDP to a Windows jump host to access their infrastructure.