After leaving Broadcom at the end of last year, I lost the control of my “VCF on VCD” lab environment (I am happy to say I was able to transfer it to a colleague, so it got a good new home :)), but that meant, I was without a lab.

So, I had to find a way to start over again. I did have an old Proliant Gen8 server available, from my previous (and current) employer, but I ran into some issues there, with the processor support, especially for the NSX Edge Nodes.

So after some frustration, I decided it was time to upgrade. It took me a short amount of time to decide that, cost-wise, the best path forward would be a Gen9. Although the processors in this server are also deprecated and will be out of support with VCF 9, the same is true for the Gold 61xx processors (and its brothers and sisters Bronze, Silver and Platinum, from the same parents) that are most affordable in the Gen10’s (or similar servers from other brands), so for a very fair price, I was able to procure a Gen9, with the following specs:

• 2 x e5-2697 v4 (18 core 2.3 Ghz.)
• 512 GB memory
• 2 x PSU
• 4 x 1 Gb network

And some additional stuff I didn’t really need, but was in the server. One thing that was defective (but I was told about this beforehand, so it was expected) was the RAID-controller battery, so I have removed that from the server. I have changed the RAID-controller to an HBA anyway, so it doesn’t serve a purpose anyway.

Fun fact, the person I bought this from was so kind as to bring it to my home, because he had a similar server he had sold and he was coming through my hometown anyway. We even found out he knew me from the VMUG. It is a small community…

I first had to decide, how do I want to go forward. I had already found the Holodeck post from Eric Sloof: https://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/3800-Deploying-Nested-VMware-Cloud-Foundation-Environments-with-Holodeck-5.2.html, which got me thinking it might be good to use this tool for the base of my home-lab.

So first step was to take the storage from my old server and place it in the new server. This went well, although I had to say goodbye to all the vm’s that were on it (because of the HBA-mode), and after a little over 5 hours in total, I had a new Holodeck based lab environment up and running.

I am not describing all the steps I took. I basically followed the manual that can be found here: https://www.vmware.com/docs/vmw-vcf-holodeck-v52-setup and it went pretty smooth.

At the end of the manual (after having deployed Aria Automation), I did find that the servers was pretty heavily utilized:

After about an hour, it started to stabilize a little, but still pretty heavily used:

One thing I ran into was the problem of not being able to access the Holo-Console from my PC, but I read a post on that here: https://adrian.heissler.at/2024/11/vmware-cloud-foundation-lab-installation-with-holodeck/ that might help anyone else running into this problem. For me it wasn’t a real problem, because I plan to change the networking and networking services on the lab, so I am going to replace the Holo-Router and Holo-CB-01a appliances with pfSense.

That’s the next blog :).