-
Lab Update – Desired Workloads
My lab is always undergoing change. Partially as I want to try new things or new ways of doing things. Sometimes because I break things (not always by accident) sometimes it’s a great way to learn…. I decided to list the workloads I am looking to run (some of these are already in place) Infrastucture…
-
Lab Update – Compute
Quite a few changes have happened in the lab recently. so I decided to do a multipart blog on the changes. The refresh was triggered by the purchase of a SuperMicro Server (2027TR-H71FRF) chassis with 4x X9DRT Nodes / Blades. This is known as a BigTwin configuration in SuperMicro parlance. This is something I was…
-
Template Deployment with Packer
Packer is one of those tools I have heard about, and some of the cool people on Twitter that I follow have been using it for a while. But until now I had never played with it. That was until I saw the below tweet by the legend that is William Lam That was the…
-
VMC Host Errors
When you run a large enough Infrastructure failure is inevitable. How you handle that can be a big differentiator. With VMware Cloud on AWS, the hosts are monitored 24×7 by VMware/AWS Support all as part of the service. If you pay for X number of hosts you should have X. That includes during maintenance and…
-
VMware Certified Master Specialist HCI 2020
I recently sat (and passed the VMware HCI Master Specialist exam (5V0-21.20). I won’t go into any details of the contents but I will comment that I felt the questions were fair and that there wasn’t anything in it to trip you up. The required knowledge was certainly wider than the vSAN specialist exam. This…
-
VMC New Host -i3en
VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) has introduced a new host to its lineup the “i3en”. This is based on the i3en.metal AWS instance. The specifications are certainly impressive packing in 96 logical cores, 768GiB RAM, and approximately 45.84 TiB of NVMe raw storage capacity per host. It’s certainly a monster with a 266% uplift in…
-
Monitoring VMC – Part 1
As previously mentioned I have been working a lot with VMware Cloud on AWS and one of the questions that often crops up is around an approach to monitoring. This is an interesting topic as VMC is technicaly “as a service” therefore the monitoring approach is a bit different. Technically AWS and VMware’s SRE teams…
-
NFS 4.1
Switching on NFS4.1 In the Homelab I like a number of Homelabers use Synology for storage. In my case, I have two a 2 bay DS216+ and a 4 bay DS918 That I have filled with SSD’s NFS has been the prefered storage protocol for most people with Synology for two main reasons the biggest being…
-
vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager – Environment
Intro As part of my new role, I have worked extensively on a project deploying VMware’s vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. It’s a project that is fairly new in the VMware ecosystem and not a lot of people have come across it. If you run any of the following products then it’s worth checking it out. vRealize…