VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast #686

So in the last few days I was honoured to be asked to come on to the VMware Community Podcast as its a show near and dear to my heart and its is always a good listen so it was nice to be able to contribute back

If you want to listen the episode is below here

The YouTube version is here if you want to see us chatting

One thing this has done is set a small fire to get an extended Holodeck series up as even after the episode I think a few our us to add some great resources to get started!

I know much like Matt I have spent a small fortune on a mini data centre and this way you can get all the good bits in possibly one unit of which can easily be rebuilt upon new releases 🙂

To kick the series of posts of though I have created a script that will provision the ESXi host with all the networking and have this set up to NTP etc ready for you just to upload the ISO and connect the relevant network adapters

I thought I would do this as its one more automated step so you can get up and running quicker if you get new hardware or drives or even a new release!

I will do a full usage guide soon but if you copy ESXi back to a USB drive and copy in the below URL to PowerShell it will find the USB and make the tweaks that are needed for an automated build

iex (irm https://vexpert.pro/holohost)

Just one thing to note, you will need to turn off Secure Boot for now, I am trying to work on a way to get this working but as standard the ks.cfg auto configuration is now supported at the time of writing this article.

That said if you provision the host and then turn on SSH you can then just paste the below to configure things!

# Enable SSH
vim-cmd hostsvc/enable_ssh
vim-cmd hostsvc/start_ssh

# Enable ESXi Shell
vim-cmd hostsvc/enable_esx_shell
vim-cmd hostsvc/start_esx_shell

# Suppress Shell warning
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /UserVars/SuppressShellWarning -i 1

# NTP
esxcli system ntp set -s pool.ntp.org
esxcli system ntp set -e 1


#Create vSwitch

esxcfg-vswitch -a VLC-A
esxcfg-vswitch -a VLC-A2
esxcfg-vswitch -a VLC-B
esxcfg-vswitch -a VLC-B2

#Set Security Policy

esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-promiscuous=true -v VLC-A
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-mac-change=true -v VLC-A
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-forged-transmits=true -v VLC-A

esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-promiscuous=true -v VLC-A2
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-mac-change=true -v VLC-A2
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-forged-transmits=true -v VLC-A2

esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-promiscuous=true -v VLC-B
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-mac-change=true -v VLC-B
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-forged-transmits=true -v VLC-B

esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-promiscuous=true -v VLC-B2
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-mac-change=true -v VLC-B2
esxcli network vswitch standard policy security set --allow-forged-transmits=true -v VLC-B2

#Configure MTU

esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 VLC-A
esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 VLC-A2
esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 VLC-B
esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000  VLC-B2

#Create Portgroups

esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup add --portgroup-name=VLC-A-PG --vswitch-name=VLC-A
esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup add --portgroup-name=VLC-A2-PG --vswitch-name=VLC-A2
esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup add --portgroup-name=VLC-B-PG --vswitch-name=VLC-B
esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup add --portgroup-name=VLC-B2-PG --vswitch-name=VLC-B2

#Set Portgroups VLANs

esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup set -p VLC-A-PG --vlan-id 4095
esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup set -p VLC-A2-PG --vlan-id 4095
esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup set -p VLC-B-PG --vlan-id 4095
esxcli network vswitch standard portgroup set -p VLC-B2-PG --vlan-id 4095

My GitHub repo for this can be found here

I will try and answer some more questions that I saw in the chat but I did see one about NVIDIA and yes its on my list but a bit tricker when its nested

Thanks once again to Eric, Corey and Matt for inspiring me as always! I will continue to work on this series and hope to bring Holodeck to a Lab and VMUG near you soon