Most of the Holodeck environments I deploy are on NFS primary storage. The Synology device I have requires an additional ESX driver to enable the hardware acceleration features when using NFS.To streamline the deployment I’ve created a custom ESX image with the driver baked-in so I don’t have to roll it out after a deployment….
In a previous post I did some benchmarking of NFS storage in a holodeck environment. The performance gains over a nested vSAN environment were significant, so others may want to run this for their testing. The automated holodeck provisioning is fantastic for vSAN OSA/ESA deployment but at the time of writing we do not have…
Running a nested test lab is fantastic for convenience and cost savings. The down side is that performance tends to suffer.With VCF Holodeck we have a couple of storage options, and in this post I plan to compare benchmarks. These numbers will not be good, but I’m aiming to determine which is the least shitty…
For this example, we’ll be showing how to upgrade/converge a basic vSphere 8 environment without VCF to VCF 9. First, review the official documentation for the pre-requisites and relevant steps. Our demo platform here is a single vSphere 8.0u3 vCenter and 4x ESX hosts running 8.0u3 and vSAN. The quick overview of the steps for…
In this post we’ll show the process to import an existing vSphere 8 Environment to a VCF 9 Deployment as a new workload domain. Lab Setup: The environments have been prepared using a dual-site Holodeck deployment.Site-A – VCF 9 Management Domain:Create a new Holodeck configConfigure as Dual Site (Set-HoloRouter -dualsite)Deploy Site-A Management Domain (New-HolodeckInstance -Version…
Welcome to Part 3, today we’ll be performing an upgrade of a Workload (WLD) domain to VCF 9, after we successfully imported the Management Domain in the previous post. Log into Operations and browse to Fleet Management / Lifecycle. This is going to look like the old SDDC Manager upgrade interface, and it works the…
Welcome back, in Part 1 we covered Configuration Templates for vCenter Servers. In this post we’ll be covering the configuration of Drift templates for VCF Clusters. Before we start, we must have already created a configuration profile for the vCenter server that hosts the Cluster – you can refer to Part 1 for this. We…
Today we’ll be looking at one of the new features of VCF 9, Configuration Drift Management. This is the evolution of Host Profiles which were available in vSphere, but unfortunately they were never compatible with VCF so many customers had challenges managing their ESX advanced settings at scale. We’ll start by creating a vCenter Config…
Welcome back, in today’s post we’ll be covering the method to deploy a new Workload Domain with VCF 9. As you’ll now be aware, a lot of the functionality has now moved away from the SDDC Manager and into VCF Operations. First, we need to commission the 3x ESX hosts are are planning to use…
Note: Steps were performed using a beta build of VCF 9, make sure you check the latest documentation to ensure you have the official procedure. My upgrade environment consists of a Holodeck build with source version VCF 5.2.1. In Part 1 of this series, I performed the upgrade of the Management Domain to VCF 9….