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…
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….
With VCF 9 there has been a lot of changes regarding the environment management. In 5.2.x and earlier we perform most Infrastructure changes from the SDDC Manager but this is being replaced with the VCF Operations Console. To upgrade from 5.2.x to 9.0, we must first upgrade the Management Domain to 9.0 via the SDDC…
The NSX Edge Cluster deployment procedure has changed significantly in VCF 9. When we performed this in previous versions, it was via the SDDC Manager (either by JSON spec or GUI in newer VCF versions). As I mentioned in previous posts, the SDDC Manager is being deprecated, so the Edge deployment has moved into the…
VCF 9 has mostly done away with the SDDC Manager – it still gets deployed, but is scheduled for deprecation. I assume it’s still there to allow customers that have deveoped their own automation workflows that hit the SDDC-M endpoint. We now have a new method of commissioning and deploying hosts via the vCenter directly….
VCF 9 has made major changes to the deployment process. The Cloud Builder + Deployment EMS spreadsheet have been deprecated and we have a brand new installer! To begin, we deploy an SDDC Manager/Installer appliance via vSphere. Once it’s online, we can begin the process. Now we connect the Installer to either an online or…
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…