Tag: VMware Cloud Foundation

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).

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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.

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