Having a VMware home lab is important to learn products like VMware Cloud Foundation. In earlier posts I’ve already provided a comprehensive description of how to setup such a lab.
In this article, I’m going to have a fresh look on my lab, especially on the foundation of it — the hardware BOM.
As already discussed during the last weeks (see also here), access to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses is changing in 2025. There are two ways to get personal VCF licenses, first being either a vExpert, or second having a VMUG Advantage membership. Both involve an active VMUG Advantage membership, and the requirement of passing the VCP-VCF certification exam, but vExperts get the VMUG Advantage membership for free (most likely only in 2025).
As I have now a new shiny lab server, I wanted to have a possibility to easily deploy and destroy a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment for learning and presentation purposes.
Deploying a full VCF stack is a lengthy process where a lot of components must be considered and need to fit together, e.g. the many VCF systems themselves, as well surrounding systems like Active Directory, or upstream routers. To make the deployment easily repeatable, the whole deployment process must be automated. Luckily, smart people at VMware have exactly done this and created the Holodeck Toolkit for this use case. Holodeck enables us to deploy a nested VCF environment on a single ESXi host in an automated fashion.
In this blog post, I’ll describe my experience deploying a single VCF 5.1.1 instance using the Holodeck Toolkit 2.0. Although the official Holodeck documentation is quite extensive, I did run into some issues during my initial deployments, which I’m going to describe here as well.
VMware Explore 2024 in Barcelona just finished. It was the first European Explore conference after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Since this acquisition, Broadcom has changed the licensing model of VMware products from perpetual to subscription, consolidation of SKUs, solution refinement, and streamlining the partner eco system.
With this background, the focus of this year’s Explore was on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), advanced services on top of VCF, VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, and VeloCloud.
The overall message was, that the future of enterprise will be private cloud centric (private cloud, private AI, private data), and VCF is the ultimate sovereign cloud solution to achieve this. It’s about staying on prep, staying in control.
As I have access to a new, fresh lab server with a spare NVMe SSD, I’ve installed ESXi 8.0 U3 on this server (see my previous blog post) to make use of a new feature called “Memory tiering over NVMe”.
“Memory tiering over NVMe” is a feature in Technical Preview that allows users to add memory capacity to a host by using NVMe devices that are installed locally in the host.
The feature utilizes the NVMe devices as tiered memory and reduces the impact to performance by intelligently choosing which VM memory locations should be stored in the slower NVMe device vs faster DRAM in the host.
In this post, I’ll briefly explain how to setup this feature.
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