I recently deployed the Azure Stack POC TP1 bits on a Lenovo ThinkPad W530. The W530 has 32GB of ram, 2 x 500GB SSD’s and 8 cores. I deployed Azure Stack to a VM using nested virtualization. The VM only had 27GB of ram. It surprisingly is fast with the TP1 bits and works well as a small lab for testing. There are several blogs out there that detail deploying Azure Stack on lower hardware specs and with nested virtualization. Here is one of the posts: http://www.jofe.ch/install-azure-stack-poc-into-a-vm/
Also there is an issue with nested virtualization. The issue is the AS host VM crashes when you RDP into any of the AS fabric virtual machines. So if you deploy the lab this way it will be limited.
I did run into some issues during the deployment and will cover these in this post. They are: