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Tips & Tricks for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using Holodeck

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The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit has become quite popular amongst our field teams for quickly spinning up a fully self-contained VCF environment, running on just a single physical ESXi host for educational and hands on experience.

Internally, we have a Holodeck Google Space which has been getting quite busy where folks can ask questions but also share their own experiences and setup using Holodeck. I had noticed there were some common questions and themes that were coming up along with some neat tips and tricks from various folks, some of which I also found quite insightful.

I know some of these tips and tricks will also benefit our customers and partners looking to deploy VCF using Holodeck, so I figure I put together a consolidated list that would benefit everyone. If you have other Holodeck tips and tricks, feel free to leave a comment and happy to keep updating this page.

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Preserving VM snapshot hierarchy across vCenter Servers

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On occasion, you might find yourself needing to take multi-level VM snapshots for various testing or development purposes, not an uncommon task for IT administrators.

In the past, if you needed to move the VM and preserve its snapshot hierarchy, it was usually difficult and involved manual tasks to unregister the VM and copying its files to the destination environment.


At VMware Explore last year, I had a customer who shared a nice tidbit regarding this topic with me that I was recently reminded of. By performing a Cross vCenter vMotion (not clone), the VM snapshot hierarchy is automatically preserved.

You of course can use the vSphere API and PowerCLI to initiate a Cross vCenter vMotion OR you can easily perform this operation by using the Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion capability that is built right into the vSphere UI, which can also be useful if you need to quickly cold migrate some workloads from older vSphere releases.

After authenticating into my source vCenter Server which is running vSphere 7.0 Update 3o, I simply select my VM with snapshots and perform a migration (not clone) and in a few minutes, it is now running in my vSphere 8.0 Update 2 destination vCenter Server!

Google Chat space notification for failed vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups using VEBA

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It is always good idea to verify that your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups are occurring and if there are any failures, you are notified about them immediately!

As alluded to at the end of that blog post, you can easily build event-driven automation using the popular VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution, triggering notifications based on several types of VCSA backup events:

  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.failed.event
  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.finished.event
  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.start.event

I recently built a PowerShell function that would send a notification to a Google Chat space by enabling their incoming webhook integration as you can seen from the screenshot below:


While the message customization is not as extensive as using Slack (e.g. supporting advanced layouts and emoji), it does get the job done and you will know immediately when a backup has failed or when it has started or has completed.

Note: For existing VEBA users (pre-v0.8 release), the function.yaml needs to be updated to trigger off of the subject keyword rather than the type, which is due to replacing the event router with Tanzu Sources for vSphere. You also need to ensure the prefix of "com.vmware.vsphere" is removed along with trailing "v0" as this is the next syntax for vCenter Events once VEBA v0.8 is released.

spec:
  broker: default
  filter:
    attributes:
      subject: com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.failed.event