VMware Holodeck 9.0.2

If you want to play around with VMware Cloud Foundation, the perfect place is to use Holodeck.

Note: This requires a subscription to use this, the Holodeck is free, but the binaries, that is used for the deployment of VCF requires a download token that has permissions to download VCF binaries.

This is a complete system to deploy VCF 9.0.x onto a single host of vSphere cluster, there are some requirement for the network and recourses.

I use this a lot for education and testing different deployment scenarios, before doing designs or deployment at customers. I also use it for demonstration of different feature when doing workshops and internal demonstrations, or developments of automations solutions.

The holodeck can be downloaded from the support.broadcom.com portal. But it requires a active subscription as there is a requirement for a download token. You can use if without licenses for 90 days.

More information can be found on the github site for the project here.

The version 9.0.2 release notes are here.

“Issue” during deployment

Issues during deployment of holodeck environment, after the deployment of the VCF installer and after all the appliances is downloaded there is a message that says it will check very 5 minutes, if you hit the enter button or other in the SSH session to the holodeck router, the scripts stops the checking, but don’t worry about that, just start the script again and I will do the remaining jobs. I just had this issue in my Lab and the supervisor service was not installed and configured, just started the installation again and it finished the job.

Access to Holodeck

If using the default setting for the Holodeck i usually deploy a jump VM with 2 nic one for my lab network, with the default gateway and a secondary nic on VLAN 10 in the holodeck network with a static IP of 10.1.1.224/24 and use the DNS address of 10.1.1.1, this is the segment where all the management and ESX ip addresses, the DNS 10.1.1.1.