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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…
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Homelab Storage Refresh (Part 1)
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 faithful Synology DS918+ and DX517 expansion bay. (Those have gone to fellow vExperts Paul Wilk and…
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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…
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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…
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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 vCentre upgrade was smooth however knowing that some of the hardware I am running…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…