While updating and testing my Automated Lab Deployment Script for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), I often found myself checking whether the bringup process has completed or not using the Cloud Builder UI.
Ideally, I could configure some type of notification that would alert me immediately when the deployment has finished or if it ran into an issue and has failed.
Since Cloud Builder is just a Photon OS VM, that gave me an idea for a quick workaround ... 🤔
I finally got some time to update my Automated VMware Cloud Foundation Lab (VCF) Deployment script to support the latest VCF 5.1 release as this has been requested by a number of folks both internally and externally.
In addition to updating some of the new resource requirements such as increasing the Nested ESXi vSAN capacity drive from 60GB to 100GB, I was also thinking about some of the feedback that I had received internally from one of our engineers and that gave me some ideas on how to further stream the deployment using automation. I also came up with a few new ideas that I have added to the script, some of which I will cover in a future blog post 😁
The first thing you will notice is that you can now specify the number of ESXi hosts to deploy both for the VCF Management Domain as well as for a Workload Domain.
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.