Update: 20250630 – The Official Holodeck 9 has now been released, so this guide is only useful if you want to deploy from scratch manually. Holodeck has become the standard for home lab VCF, and it’s easy to see why. It’s probably going to be a while before the official scripts are released, so here’s…
The parts have all landed (finally) including the extra fans I needed.Here’s the install pic showing the extra CPUs, fans, memory and 25Gbit RNDC card installed. Luckily the RAM from the old Gibson was also compatible with the new hardware, so I’ve pulled some extra memory. ESX installed, hosts cut over and the old ones…
THE HARDWARE HAS LANDED. Well some of it anyway, and I was ready to build but… (there’s usually a but with IT projects). There’s some stuff I forgot/overlooked/got blindsided by. 1: Since I bought single socket servers, I forgot about the CPU heatsinks.2: The single socket servers don’t have fans in front of the empty…
The time has come to upgrade the Gibson, for two main reasons. I’m running out of resources for the projects I’m trying to simulate, and the Broadwell CPUs in my existing hardware will be deprecated with VCF 9, which is on the horizon. There’s going to be a lot of labbing and learning required when…
I recently upgraded my home network with a UniFi UDM Pro router. These have only just been updated with support for BGP, so it’s now a really nice fit for my use case. The documentation around BGP is pretty light at the moment, and it doesn’t feel “fully” integrated to the UniFi management suite. I…
This code snip is used to set the expiry on NSX accounts to “9999” days to ensure we don’t get any annoying account lockouts. For VCF we cannot just disable password expiry, as it will cause SDDC Manager workflow issues if an empty expiry time is returned from NSX. This is my first attempt at…
When deploying Holodeck, I like to add the VMs to a vApp so I can power-up/power-down the environment from one place. Because this is running vSAN, we want all the nodes to power up simultaneously to minimise any potential issues with the vSAN consistency.When we create a vApp, the VMs will just get added to…
There’s some tasks that I always like to do after deploying a fresh holodeck environment.This example shows how to automatically configure DRS rules to pin the vCenter to the first ESX host, and NSX to the second ESX host. This helps me easily find the VMs when starting up the environment. Here’s a PowerCLI example…
My posts mention Holodeck a lot, if you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t come across this yet, it provides a mostly automated method to deploy a fully functional VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) lab with reduced hardware. You can deploy a full nested VCF stack on a single (beefy) host, which make it much…
The L2VPN functionality of VMware NSX can be used to extend your software defined network segments into remote datacenters or your cloud provider tenancy. This provides an excellent solution for migrating your workloads without requiring IP address changes. This post will go through a sample configuration to configure an L2VPN and extend an NSX Overlay…