MultiHost Holodeck VCF
About
Disclaimer: This is not a supported configuration by the Holodeck team please don’t reach out to them for help. As of today the only way to run Holodeck and receive support is to do it on a single compute node.
Table of Contents
- Holodeck recommended specifications
- Networking
- DNS
- vCentre Configuration
- CPU/EVC config
- Holodeck deployment
- Success
- Deployment Notes
The VCF Holodeck toolkit is an excellent tool for learning not just VCF but a lot of technology that can be run on top of it. e.g. HCX, Tanzu vRA etc. Several guides have been written to assist with that.
However, the downside is that you need a single large fast vSphere host to run it on. The minimum specs are listed below for a few different configuration options. This shouldn’t be a challenge for a company or partner to provide but as a homelab enthusiast, this was always going to be a challenge. Many folks I know can cover the below resource requirements with the homelab they have. But the challenge is doing this with a single node. This was also going to be an issue for me. Therefore I needed to come up with a plan to make this work across at least 2 hosts….
Holodeck recommended specifications
Minimum Hardware (1 env)Recommended Hardware (2 envs)Recommended Hardware (3-5 envs)VCF Consolidated VCF Standard (MGMT + WLD)VCF Standard (MGMT + WLD)2 sockets – Total 16 cores2 sockets – Total 32 core2 sockets – Total 64 cores384 GB RAM1024 GB RAM1.5 TB RAM3.5 TB SSD Disk2 – 3.5 TB SSD Disk4 – 3.5TB SSD Disks
I was planning to use two of my existing Supermicro hosts that were already connected to my vCentre. They each have 2x Intel Xeon CPU E5-2670 @ 2.60GHz with 192GB of RAM each. The combined resources should be enough to run Holodeck and experiment with other toolsets on top. All of the storage is to be presented by my TrueNas setup.
Networking
Both hosts were originally connected through a DVSwitch and 2x25Gb/s physical adaptors. To change the configuration for Holodeck I removed one of the adaptors in each host from the DVswitch. I then followed the Holodeck guide and configured the standard switch as required on each host. I then added the unused 25Gb/s adaptor to the standard switch and then physically connected the two hosts with a short DAC cable as seen below.