I just finished installing and setting up holodeck in my lab environment, this is basically two nested VMware cloud foundations (VCF) environments. I wont go into installing it as the current blogs out there are pretty good with lots of pictures and videos. I will put the links below.
https://core.vmware.com/resource/holodeck-toolkit-overview#nested-environment-overview
https://core.vmware.com/introducing-holodeck-toolkit
https://core.vmware.com/cloud-foundation-holodeck-setup – How too guide
https://core.vmware.com/blog/introducing-vcf-holodeck-toolkit
The cool things about it.
- Different IP addressing across the two VCF environments
- Deploys a virtual router in the middle of the VCF environments (so if you want you can setup NSX-T federation on it, setup HCX, or even SRM)
- virtual router has connections to both port groups for Site A and B
- Its is completely isolated as it is not connected to any physical uplinks on your ESXi host
- All nested virtual machines so it can sit on one ESXi Host.
- Has all the cool stuff – DNS, NTP, BGP, DHCP, Active directory, Certificate authority on Windows 2019 eval box that is valid for 6 months
- Current latest VCF version 4.5
My ESXi host that I installed it on is
VMware ESXi, 8.0.0, 20513097
PowerEdge R730
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 v4 @ 2.00GHz
256gb DDR4
4TB SSD Samsung evo
Yes the memory was almost maxed out.
The virtual machines on the host
Port groups look like
SITE A logical diagram – https://images.core.vmware.com/sites/default/files/imported-images/node_3944_0329-124629/40997-0329-124627/40997-0329-124627-3.png
SITE B logical diagram – https://images.core.vmware.com/sites/default/files/imported-images/node_3944_0329-124629/40997-0329-124627/40997-0329-124627-5.png
My comments.
I like the fact it has all the extras you would expect in a customers environment such as AD, Certificate authority etc.. As you can test and play with a complete VCF environment not just the VMware deployed products. This is something I would use or recommend to customers as a sandpit environment. This is a great training environment as well without consequence of impacting your NON production or production environment. The only thing you will need is a beefy box (as you can see my box was not lol) and licenses. So the licenses you will need are NSX-T, ESXi, vCenter and vSAN, I do know vmug advantage membership provides licenses for like 250$ a year but check if they will work for VCF. Oh before I forget I paid $1200 for my R730 from ebay Australia website.
Comment if you have any questions.