How to Install VMware VCSA 6.7 with less than 10GB RAM

What

Install VMware VCSA 6.7 with less than 10GB RAM

If you are building a home lab (with VMware Workstation), more often than not you’ll be struggling with the resources of your physical PC, in general with the amount of memory. New versions of vSphere require at least 10GB RAM for “Tiny” VCSA deployments. This also means that the (virtual) server hosting VCSA should have even more RAM, over 10GB, to reserve some for the hypervisor.

If you don’t have these minimum requirements, you’ll get a warning message as below.

For a VMware Workstation lab, you’ll only create a few VMs to test and play around with, yet this minimum amount of RAM required seems to be too high, and probably you’ll need extra memory for other services and applications.

For my environment, I want to change the minimum hardware requirements from 10GB to 6GB, of a tiny deployment.

How

Note: The resources required for the different VCSA deployments are the recommendations by VMware. These recommendations guarantee that your vSphere environment will work in full harmony with all VMware products. DO NOT change these parameters in a production environment.

1. From the VMware VCSA installation folder, go to Vcsa-ui-installer \ win32 \ resources \ app \ resources.
2. Open the file named layout.json with Notepad. You might want to create a copy of this file first.
3. Inside the layout.json file, scroll down to “tiny”. There are several options so make sure you select the one with the label: "Tiny vCenter Server with Embedded PSC", which is based on Deployment size, Tiny, Storage size, default (300GB), and with Embedded PSC.

4. Change “memory” to the desired value. 6GB (6144MB) in my case. Save the changes.
5. Next time you run VCSA installation you’ll see that the Tiny deployment has been down-seized to 6GB (or your value)

6. Now you can continue with the deployment of your VCSA.

Note: This change won’t be reflected on the Virtual Hardware when the VCSA (VM) is created, it can’t be changed and you still see 10GB. But from the Resource Monitor, you’ll see that 6GB is used as a limit.