Managing my Homelab with SemaphoreUI
An intro on how I use SemaphoreUI to manage my Homelab
Warp – The intelligent terminal
How Warp is helping me run my homelab.
Self Hosting AI Stack using vSphere, Docker and NVIDIA GPU
Artificial intelligence is all the rage at the moment, It’s getting included in every product announcement from pretty much every vendor under the sun. Nvidia’s stock price has gone to the moon. So I thought I better get some knowledge and understand some of this. As it’s a huge field and I wasn’t exactly sure…
Can you really squeeze 96TB in 1U ?
Yes, that’s a clickbait title. But technically it’s possible if I dropped all drive redundancy… I recently saw an advert for a server that was just too good to be true. It promised to bring a huge amount of storage and future options in a quite hard-to-believe 1U. The price it was on offer for…
New Nodes
I recently decided to update some of my homelab hosts and I managed to do this at very little cost by offloading 2 of my Supermicro e200’s to fellow vExpert Paul. The below post describes what I bought why and how I have configured it. Table of Contents Node Choice Bill of Materials Rescue IPMI…
Configure DHCP Option 43 for UniFi devices to enable remote adoption across subnets
How to configure DHCP Option 43 for UniFi devices
Nvidia Tesla P4 Homelab Setup
A little while ago I decided to play with vGPU in my homelab. This was something I had dabbled with in the past but never really had the time or need to get working properly. The first thing that I needed was a GPU. I did have a Dell T20 with an iGPU built into…
Homelab Storage Refresh (Part 1)
Table of Contents Background ZFS Overview Read Cache (ARC and L2ARC) ZIL (ZFS Intent Log) Hardware Background I have just completed the move of all my production and media-based storage/services to TrueNAS Scale. ( I will just refer to this as TrueNAS) This is based on my HP Z840 and I have now retired my…
Intel Optane NVMe Homelab
I have been a VMware vExpert for many years and it has brought me many many benefits over the years. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say I probably wouldn’t have my current role within VMware without it. One of the best benefits has been access to a huge amount of licences for VMware…
- Homelab | Networking | Storage | VMware
100Gb/s in my Homelab
For a while, I’ve been looking to update the networking at the core of my homelab. I have had some great results with the current setup utilising a number of DAC’s but there were a couple of things that were annoying me. Then MikroTik dropped the CRS504-4XQ-IN and if the price wasn’t horrendous then that…
Forcing an Upgrade to vSphere 8
I run a reasonably extensive homelab that is of course built around the VMware ecosystem. So with the release of vSphere 8 I was obviously going to upgrade however a few personal things blocked me from doing it until now. The vCenter upgrade was smooth however knowing that some of the hardware I am running…
- Docker | Homelab | Hosting | Kubernetes
Use Portainer in a Homelab with GitHub
Late to the party or not, I have been using containers in my lab more and more and that has led me to Portainer…. I use it for managing the docker containers on my Synology but it can also be used for managing lots of other things. In their own words “Portainer accelerates container adoption….
Homelab bad days (almost)
I recently spent 3 weeks in Ireland with my wife Wendy and our son Nate. This involves driving from the south coast of Dorset up to Scotland and then getting a ferry over to Belfast before travelling west to the Republic. While driving I got a slack notification that one of my SSD’s in my…
Starlink
Since moving to Dorset last year internet connectivity has been the bane of my existence. Currently, I have an ADSL connection provided by my old employer Zen and a 5G connection provided by Three. These are both plumbed into my WatchGuard Firewall with multi-wan configured. Most of the time the usability is ok but there…
Lab Update – Part 2 Storage Truenas Scale
The HP Z840 has changed its role to a permanent storage box running Truenas Scale. This is in addition to my Synology DS918+ TrueNas is the successor to FreeNas a very popular BSD based StorageOS and TrueNas scale is a fork of this based on Linux. The Synology has been an amazing piece of kit…
Lab Update – Part 3 Network
I have retired the WatchGuard Devices with the migration to PFSense running bare-metal in one of the Supermicro Nodes. I will likely virtualise this in the future. In terms of network/switching I have moved to an intermediate step here vMotion and Storage are running over DAC’s while VMware management and VM traffic is still over…
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…
- Automation | Homelab | VMware
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…
Lab Storage
Lab Storage Update. Since starting my new role with Xtravirt my Homelab has gone through several fairly significant changes. At the moment it’s very much focused on the VMware stack and one of the things I needed was some more storage and especially some more storage performance. With that in mind, I purchased a new Synology…
Lab Storage
I have been meaning to post around some of the lab setup for a while. Although it changes frequently at present it’s as below. I will add some pics when I have tidied up the lab/cables My primary lab storage is all contained within an HP Gen8 Microserver. Currently Configured: 1x INTEL Core i3-4130 running at…
Nutanix CE
I ran a Nutanix CE server at home for a little while when it first came out. However, due to the fairly high requirements, it didn’t make sense to me to continue running it at home. This was compounded by the fact that I have many clusters to play with at work. These all run my…
