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Hacking Holodeck for VCF 9

Byjarrad

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 workarounds I’ve used to deploy a nested VCF 9 platform in my lab. I’ve probably oversized this environment, so I’m planning to tune it a bit later.

This guide assumes you’re running the Advanced Holodeck mode (providing your own DNS/NTP/DHCP/BGP infrastructure instead of Basic Holodeck mode which deploys that all on the CloudBuilder VM).

Create 6x ESXi Hosts
24 vCPU / 128GB each (Automation requires a 24vCPU Nested VM – hence the large size).
4x NICs connected to your Holodeck Trunk PG.
Disk Layout – 40GB OS / 150GB vSAN Cache / 1TB vSAN Capacity (Thin Prov).
If you don’t plan to run Automation you can downsize the CPU count.
Ensure you have enabled “Hardware Virtualization”

Install ESXi 9 build as per the VCF BOM and complete the standard VCF pre-reqs (enable SSH/NTP/Regenerate Certs etc).

With VCF 9 the Aria architecture has changed, and components no-longer reside on an AVN segment.
I’ve created some new DNS entries so I can still bring up older VCF versions without having to roll those changes back, and I picked IP addresses that don’t conflict with Holodeck components.

Fleet Management (Replacement for SDDC Manager + Aria Suite Lifecycle)
fleet.vcf.sddc.lab – 10.0.0.162

Identity Broker (Replacement for vIDM)
broker.vcf.sddc.lab – 10.0.0.6

Aria Suite
vrops-9.vcf.sddc.lab – 10.0.0.160
vrops-cp-9.vcf.sddc.lab – 10.0.0.161
logs-9.vcf.sddc.lab – 10.0.0.7
vra-9.vcf.sddc.lab – 10.0.0.8

That’s it for now, the infrastructure will now be ready to deploy.

In the next post I’ll show how we use these hosts to deploy VCF9.

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