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…
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…