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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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What's in the new VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers?

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Since the announcement of the two new VMware offerings: VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) at the end of 2023, I have been trying to wrap my head around the new offers and to better help me understand the next level of details, I have put together several diagrams across the various offers and applicable add-ons that can be purchased.

After sharing these diagrams internally, the feedback was extremely positive and I thought I would also share these diagrams with our users and partners who might still have questions around the new offers. I have also created a short URL which you can access by going to vmwa.re/skus

In addition, we have also published a VMware KB 95927 (Inventory Script) and VMware KB 96426 (Calculator Script) that can be used to help our users understand the new licensing model which uses both CPU cores and TiB (for vSAN storage sizing), please refer to the KB articles for more details.

Changelog:

  • 11/08/24 - Updated with new SKU offers (vSphere Enterprise Plus & VCF Edge)
  • 03/20/24 - Updated with VMware Live Recovery (VLR includes LSR & LCR) and Private AI Foundation Add-On
  • 02/16/24 - Updated VCF w/CSP + new VMware by Broadcom theme colors
  • 02/13/24 - Removed 8TiB minimal purchase per new VMware KBs & updated VCF w/VMware Data Services Manager (DSM)
  • 01/12/24 - Updated VCF w/TAM, PSO and Learning Service Add-On
  • 01/09/24 - Updated VCF w/CSP Add-On and VCDR/RWR/SRM Add-On for VVS/VVEP

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)


Products & Support Services includes:

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Workaround for VMware Cloud Builder 10GbE pre-check in VMware Cloud Foundation 5.0

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VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.0 is now generally available for customers to upgrade and I had a chance to play with it in my homelab before it was released.

One change that I had noticed in the new version of the VMware Cloud Builder for VCF 5.0 compared to VCF 4.5 is the introduction of a new 10GbE pre-check to ensure that your physical ESXi hosts met the minimum networking requirement. For a production deployment, this pre-check makes a ton of sense but for a homelab/development environment where you may not have 10GbE connectivity, this is certainly not ideal, especially as this was possible with VCF 4.5.

With VCF 5.0, this new pre-check is considered an error and will prevent you from continuing the VCF deployment as you can see from the error message below.


Fortunately, I was able to find an easy workaround to the issue that would still allow users to deploy the latest VCF 5.0 without 10GbE networking! 😀

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