Right off the rip, I think it’s important to mention that the official Holodeck documentation is very good and worth reading top-to-bottom.
https://vmware.github.io/Holodeck/latest/
The focus of this post will be to demonstrate how I deploy and use Holodeck in my own lab. I’ll walk through the deployment process that I use on my single host environment and share some tips along the way.
I’m documenting here the steps I took to deploy the bare minimum requirements to run workloads with VCF on my Dell T7920.
Dell T7920
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon 6262V
RAM: 768GB RAM
Boot Drive: 512 GB NVMe
Storage: 8x 2TB NVMe, 128GB SSD
This can be done with less. I just happened to have built this machine with an eBay seller prior to prices increasing, when NVMe drives were as affordable as they ever were.
If you’ve spent any time managing firewall rules, you already know that chasing down dynamic IP addresses of modern web services is impossible. Fortunately, NSX offers layer 7 context profiles, allowing you to drop traffic based on domain name (FQDN) by inspecting the TLS SNI or the plaintext HTTP host header. It’s a great way to enforce basic web filtering.