VMware Holodeck in a #HomeLab

So since all the announcement’s at VMware Explore 2023 in Vegas I thought it was time to get my lab back in order along with all the latest updates. I noticed during some of the sessions that a project called Holodeck was mentioned and soon found this was a great expansion of an automated full stack lab with all the bells and whistles within in.

This has all been made possible thanks to the VCF Lab Constructor of which is like a fling supported by the amazing Ben Sier (Twitter @datareload) and USBenny on #VLCSlack http://tiny.cc/getVLCSlack
You can read up more here https://core.vmware.com/introducing-holodeck-toolkit

The biggest thing you will see if the entry requirements are quite high!

Many of you know I love a challenge and this is what the team officially supports! Another note is your hardware also needs to be on the VMware 8 HCL or it would not work 🙁

I soon found this when I got the below error

Some of you reading this know I would not be writing this unless I found some tweaks and ways of making this work! In short it takess very little in file edits and after much trial and error it seems you can get away with around 288GB Physical RAM, You also need a 1TB SSD or in this demo below I used a striped 1TB pair. That said at time if writing you can get some great deals on some NVME drives and you can buy an inexpensive PCIe card to put this in but I wanted to see how slow I could get away with and it still getting created.

As you can see below I found anything much lower than this spec the NSX manager build would time out as the memory would ballon causing errors.

So you want to get started, well firstly you need to head over to https://via.vmw.com/Get-Holo-Toolkit and then I would suggest firing up the great documentation over at https://core.vmware.com/cloud-foundation-holodeck-20-setup

Follow the first steps in creating the HoloDeck console ISO and get this all set up along with the HoloDeck router so you can RDP into the environment

Believe it or not you only need to tweak one file to get the legacy hardware working!

Remember from here you now need to know you may not get any support from the Holodeck team 🙂

Head over to the following folders on the HoloDeck Console you have just built C:\VLC\VLC-Holo-Site-1

Open up the VLCGUI.ps1 with Notepad++ and search for accepteula

You should see a line just underneath $kscfg+=”install –firstdisk –novmfsondisk you need to add the following

--ignoreprereqwarnings --ignoreprereqerrors --forceunsupportedinstall

Save the file up and continue to follow the guide as you normally would 🙂 Just be warned this can take anywhere up to 3-5 hours to complete!!

DNS!!

So my hosts are all managed by my vCenter or at least within my own DNS as well thats how it should be right 🙂

If out the box you tried to look up anything outside the console it will fail but if you do want to be able to resolve your local DNS it is pretty easy. Open up the DNS panel on the Holo Console box and right click Conditional Forwarders

Pop in your DNS along with any server IPs hosting this and you should then be able to resolve this!