Announcing the General Availability of Holodeck 9.1

We’re thrilled to announce the General Availability of Holodeck 9.1, a major release that brings significant new capabilities to your nested VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) toolkit!

Today’s infrastructure teams face increasing pressure to validate new capabilities quickly, reliably, and at scale, without monopolizing precious production hardware. Holodeck has always been the answer to that challenge, and with the 9.1 release, it takes a major leap forward. Holodeck 9.1 builds on the strong 9.0 foundation. This release adds support for the latest VCF versions, expanded nested networking architectures, richer Day 2 operations, and quality-of-life improvements that make deploying and managing nested VCF environments easier than ever.

New to Holodeck? it’s a self-contained, automated, and repeatable solution that virtualizes the entire VCF management and workload domain stack. It ships with built-in infrastructure services like NTP, DNS, BGP, and DHCP, so your teams can spin up production-representative VCF environments on a single ESX host or a modest vSphere cluster. Holodeck provides fast, consistent, hands-off deployment so your engineers can focus on what matters: understanding and adopting VCF’s powerful capabilities.

Let’s dive into what’s new in Holodeck 9.1.

What’s New in Holodeck 9.1

New Version Support: VCF 9.1.0.0, VCF 5.2.3, and VCF 5.2.4

Holodeck 9.1 adds full support for the latest VCF releases across both the VCF 9.x and VCF 5.x tracks. You can now deploy and test VCF 9.1.0.0, VCF 5.2.3, and VCF 5.2.4 environments, including VVF (vSphere Foundation) 9.1.0.0. Holodeck 9.1 enhances the -Version parameter to accept “9.1.0.0”, “5.2.3”, and “5.2.4”, keeping the experience consistent and simple regardless of which version branch you’re targeting. The full supported version matrix now covers:

VCF 9.1.0.0 and VVF 9.1.0.0
VCF 9.0.x series (9.0.0.0 through 9.0.2.0)
VCF 5.2.x series (5.2 through 5.2.4)

Virtual Network Appliance (VNA) Support for Distributed Networking

This is one of the headline additions in Holodeck 9.1. Holodeck now supports VNA cluster deployments, enabling you to model distributed networking architectures in your nested environments. VNA-based deployments reflect the modern, scalable networking model that VCF 9.1 introduces, distributing network functions across the environment rather than centralizing them at an edge.

Crucially, Holodeck continues to support Edge cluster deployments for centralized networking across both management and workload domains. Whether your target architecture relies on distributed (VNA) or centralized (Edge) networking, Holodeck 9.1 has you covered, giving your teams the flexibility to test the topology that matches your real-world deployment plans without any additional infrastructure.

This also means that Supervisor deployment in both management and workload domain in VCF 9.1 now supports the option to specify distributed (VNA-based) or centralized (Edge-based) networking options as the supervisor’s backing network.

New -Site Parameter and Improved Multi-Site Support

New-HoloDeckConfig command now defaults to creating two config files, one for Site A and one for Site B, to eliminate race conditions when deploying dual site in parallel. The command automatically then loads the config file for Site A into the PowerShell context.

Import-HoloDeckConfig command in Holodeck 9.1 introduces a new -Site parameter that provides finer-grained control over site-specific deployments and operations. This ensures Holodeck loads the correct site config file.

Enhanced Security, Validation, and Diagnostics

Holodeck 9.1 raises the bar on operational robustness with three important infrastructure improvements:

Enhanced Security: Holodeck 9.1 now handles build tokens and credentials as secure strings, reducing the risk of accidental credential exposure in logs or output.
Better Validation: Holodeck 9.1 adds comprehensive pre-checks for VCF 9.1 resource requirements. Before a deployment begins, Holodeck validates that your environment meets all necessary prerequisites, catching configuration mismatches early and saving you the frustration of mid-deployment failures.
Improved Diagnostics: Holodeck 9.1 enhances error reporting and troubleshooting capabilities with richer, more actionable error messages to help you quickly identify and resolve issues when they arise.

New Infrastructure Services

Holodeck 9.1 significantly expands the built-in service catalog that ships with every nested environment, adding enterprise-grade capabilities that more closely mirror what teams run in production.

HashiCorp Vault: Holodeck 9.1 integrates HashiCorp Vault as a built-in certificate and secrets management service, giving your nested environments a production-representative certificate and secrets store right out of the box. This is invaluable for teams validating automation workflows, pipelines, or Day 2 operations that rely on secure certificate management and secret retrieval.
Authentik — Single Sign-On: Authentik is now bundled as the identity and SSO provider for the Holodeck environment, accessible at https://auth.vcf.lab or https://ip:9443. It supports SCIM for automated user provisioning, enabling teams to test IAM integrations and access control workflows without standing up a separate identity stack.
Technitium DNS: Holodeck 9.1 replaces dnsmasq with Technitium as an advanced, web-managed DNS server, accessible at https://dns.vcf.lab and https://ip:5380. It delivers improved DNS performance and caching capabilities beyond the baseline DNS services provided in previous releases, and is particularly useful for teams validating complex name resolution scenarios in their nested environments. DNS zones, DNS records, and DHCP scopes are now fully managed through the Technitium web UI. This gives administrators a clean, visual interface for all DNS and DHCP configuration tasks. As part of this shift, we have deprecated the HolodeckDNSConfig PowerShell commands and will no longer be supported going forward. The Technitium UI is the sole management surface going forward.
Certsrv extension: Holodeck 9.1 adds certsrv extension to extend the certificate management capability by emulating the Active Directory Certificate Services with Vault as the backend, enabling seamless integration with VCF

Holorouter Enhancements

The Holorouter, Holodeck’s self-contained routing and infrastructure appliance receives some of the most impactful upgrades in this release, making it more secure, more capable, and significantly easier to access and operate.

GitOps with Built-in GitLab: The OVA deployment now provides a checkbox to enable GitOps during deployment. When deployed with GitOps enabled, Holorouter now automatically installs and configures GitLab, creates a pre-loaded repository with the Holodeck deployment pipeline, and registers Holorouter as a GitLab runner with the appropriate tags and parameters. The result: teams can trigger a complete Holodeck deployment directly from the GitLab UI. This is a game-changer for teams building CI/CD workflows around VCF environment provisioning.
HTTPS Everywhere: All Holorouter services now communicate exclusively over HTTPS via a built-in reverse proxy. SSL certificates are automatically provisioned and managed for all services, eliminating manual certificate handling and hardening the security posture of every Holodeck environment by default.
Webtop Authentication: The Webtop browser-in-browser interface, accessible on port 30000 of the HoloRouter management IP, now requires authentication. This closes a previously open access surface and aligns Webtop’s security posture with the rest of the HoloRouter service stack.
Firefox Bookmarks and Passwords: Nested VCF component URLs and credentials are now automatically added to Mozilla Firefox in the Webtop environment, saving engineers the manual step of tracking down endpoints and credentials when first accessing a fresh deployment.

Expanded Day 2 Operations

Holodeck 9.1 significantly expands what you can do after initial deployment, turning your nested environment into a more complete lifecycle testing platform.

VCF Automation as a Day 2 Operation: You can now deploy VCF Automation as a Day 2 operation in your existing Holodeck environments, eliminating the need to deploy VCF Automation during Day 0 deployment. This allows you to deploy the rest of the VCF stack and check resource consumption and availability before deploying VCF Automation, ensuring you have sufficient capacity to run the full stack.
Supervisor as a Day 2 Operation: Holodeck 9.1 introduces the ability to deploy Supervisor as a Day 2 operation in both management and workload domains, and in both distributed (VNA) and centralized (Edge) networking modes. This means you can validate Kubernetes-on-VCF scenarios post-deployment, across the full range of supported networking architectures.
Add New Nested ESX Hosts as a Day 2 Operation: Need to scale out your nested environment? Holodeck 9.1 lets you add new nested ESX hosts to an existing deployment as a Day 2 operation, allowing you to test cluster expansion workflows and validate host-addition procedures without rebuilding from scratch.
Set up SSO with Authentik: Use the Initialize-Authentik and Set-VCFSSOConfiguration commands to configure Authentik as the OIDC provider in VCF Operations and start using the VCF SSO without manual configuration.

Existing parameters continue to work seamlessly with VCF 9.1 environments. The -AdditionalCluster and -AddVcfAutomationAllAppsOrg parameters, familiar to users of previous Holodeck releases are fully compatible with VCF 9.1, ensuring a smooth transition and no workflow disruption as you upgrade your testing practice to the new version stack.

Get Started with Holodeck 9.1

Holodeck 9.1 is available now. Whether you’re evaluating VCF 9.1’s new distributed networking capabilities, building out a Kubernetes-on-VCF proof of concept, or simply needing a fast, repeatable way to get a full VCF stack on the ground for testing and training, Holodeck 9.1 gives you the most capable nested lab platform we’ve shipped to date.

With VNA support, expanded Day 2 operations, and a rock-solid foundation refined across the 9.0.x release series, Holodeck 9.1 empowers your teams to move faster, break less, and understand more, exactly what great infrastructure tooling should do.

Ready to get started? Here are all the resources you need:

Download Holodeck 9.1 — Get the latest release and start deploying nested VCF environments today.
Release Notes & Documentation — Review the full release notes for complete technical details, supported versions, and configuration guidance.
Report an Issue — Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on GitHub and help us make Holodeck even better.

We look forward to hearing what you build.

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