Holodeck Toolkit via VCF Lab Constructor

 View Only
  • 1.  Slow mgmt with webtop

    Posted Jan 13, 2026 11:51 AM

    I experienced that webtop has limitations, and specifically in the several VCF UI `s the performance is very slow. The previous Holoconsole was RDP and quite responsive and functional as long as the routing in Holorouter was OK.

    Replacing RDP with VNC would not be my first choice, but based on the changes in the new toolkit/holorouter i can see why this was done.

    I therefore looked for an alternative, and i guess there are several, but what i did try was SSH Socks proxy, and this worked really well, especially for tasks in the UI. Some things you still need webtop for, but for a lab or demo in VCF Operations or Automation, that means UI tasks, the performance is basically the same as VPN or RDP.
     Todo:

    • edit sshd_config on holorouter to allow port forwarding(you can narrow this down to only communicate with your mgmt vm)
    • setup a ssh connection in powershell to the Holorouter
    • ssh -N -D 1080 user@<HOLOUTER_IP>
    • configure Firefox to use socks proxy
    • gives you DNS via Socks, so you can use FQDN in this browser and open stuff directly from Holodeck environment.

    Let me know if this works for you!



    -------------------------------------------


  • 2.  RE: Slow mgmt with webtop

    Posted Feb 20, 2026 11:36 AM

    I was able to, on the new Holorouter for 9.0.2, add the following to the iptables to forward RDP port 3389. Now i can RDP into the lab like i used to on the old holodeck router.

    this is what worked for me

    iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 3389 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.1.1.201:3389


    iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp -d 10.1.1.201 --dport 3389 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

    iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp -s 10.1.1.201 --sport 3389 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

    make persist
    echo "net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

    -------------------------------------------