Some ramblings usually about computers
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. Node Choice I have been Continue Reading
How to configure DHCP Option 43 for UniFi devices
How to deploy Holodeck with Legacy CPU’s
How to Deploy VMware Holodeck on multiple hosts
An Overview of vSAN ESA in VMC
Back in July I bought a new house and one of the best things about the property was that it was already in a City Fibre location. That meant I could take my Zen internet connection with me but ditch the ADSL (and Phone Line requirement). This gave me a Continue Reading
A list of useful Truenas Scale commands
I recently helped my friend Dean Lewis @veducate with some hosting issues. As part of the testing of this he kindly gave me a login to his WordPress instance. He has been a pretty prolific blogger over the years pumping out an amazing amount of really good content. It also Continue Reading
Yesterday I sat and passed the above exam. It had been on my todo list for a good number of years. With the current pause in the Broadcom VMware takeover deal. I had some downtime and decided to use one of the three exam vouchers VMware give me each year. Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
There is a lot of uncertainty with VMware at the moment. This is all due to the pending acquisition by Broadcom. There are a lot of unknowns for the staff and customers about what the company will look like in the future. I certainly have some concerns mainly just with Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
I am a huge fan of the Runecast product and luckily as a vExpert they give out NFR licences for my lab. One of the really cool features I wanted to mention today was the remediation script function. I have been playing with storage a lot in my lab recently Continue Reading
I have been using Cloudflare to protect my web assets for a really long time. Throughout that time Cloudflare has been improving there capabilities and approximately 2 years ago I decided to move this blog into their worker’s product. This meant that the site was 100% served from their datacentre’s Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
As part of my day job at VMware, I look after the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) products in VMware’s Hybrid Cloud portfolio. This is a page of handy links (effectively a dump of my bookmarks) of the public-facing information and tools. Cloud Services Continue Reading
For a while now I have been running this site directly from Cloudflare utilising their excellent worker’s product. I did this originally as a learning exercise but due to the benefits It brought and the ease of use I decided to stick with it. The benefits are several fold: A Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
I am a massive fan of the brew package management system for macOS and use it on all of my Mac’s I typically just upgrade everything blindly and have never had an issue….. Until today… I went to push some changes to this site and got the following error message Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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. Continue Reading
I have been making several changes (mainly cosmetic to this site over the last day or so) On most changes I have been doing an export and then uploading the site to Cloudflare using Wrangler. After a while I received an email from Cloudflare saying: Hi, You’re 50% of the Continue Reading
A while ago I started messing with Cloudflare Workers. I have now moved this site permanently over to them. This is partly related to some issues I have been having with internet access at home. Prior to this, the site ran from within my lab. This means the site is Continue Reading
I have slowly morphed into an Apple fanboy over the last decade or so collecting a large number of devices ever since my first MacBook Air back in 2011. When you’re in the ecosystem additional devices just make sense….. I currently have: My Wife also has All in all a Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
Given the year that was 2020 and at the time of writing a distinct improvement appears a long way off I decided it was time to up my homeworking game. I bought a beautiful Dell 49″ monitor back in mid-2020 that has been the central focus of my home office. Continue Reading
I was initially going to add in the contents of this post to one that I have been writing about my exploits with Hashicorp Packer but I decided it probably warranted being separated out. While working with the following awesome project I noticed a couple of minor errors and Improvements Continue Reading
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. Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
Moving from Wordpress to Cloudflare Workers
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 Continue Reading
I saw a tweet a couple of weeks ago mentioning that Nutanix were offering a free go at the Nutanix Certified Professional exam. They are also offering free on-demand training to go with it. In my current role, I haven’t used Nutanix however I have good experience using it as Continue Reading
I have been a huge fan of Cloudflare since they first came to my attention. I did a post on them a few years ago. They do an excellent job of improving web performance and increasing security. I also find Cloudflare’s Blog a fascinating read I saw a tweet by Chris Wahl recently where he talked Continue Reading
As everyone knows by now the world has changed possibly forever. Due to Covid19 working from home has become the new normal. We are lucky in the IT world that this has been fairly straightforward for most of us. We are privileged in that it’s possible for us to continue Continue Reading
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 technically “as a service” therefore the monitoring approach is a bit different. Technically Continue Reading
Today was a good day. I renewed my AWS Solution Architect certification. Although my work is primarily in and around the VMware ecosystem I have been working a lot with VMware Cloud on AWS recently with a number of our customers. Having a good foundation of Continue Reading
Switching on NFS4.1 In the Homelab I like several 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 SSDs NFS has been the prefered storage protocol for most people with Synology for two main reasons the Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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, Continue Reading
I have seen a few posts online recently about the tools and technology people use on a day to day basis. A few components that I have no one seems to have mentioned yet. So I thought it was probably a good idea to share my list. I will probably Continue Reading
In this day and age, two-factor authentication (2FA) is basically a must. I try and use it on any system that supports it. I have a Yubikey and I am a massive fan of this but not everything supports U2F and sometimes it’s not convenient. I recently have seen an announcement Continue Reading
I decided it was about time I replaced my trusted MacBook Air that I purchased back in 2011. After waiting and watching the Apple announcements over the last couple of years I decided the MacBook Pro’s weren’t worth it. So I have replaced my Air with yes you Continue Reading
I have worked for my current employer Zen Internet for 3.5 years. Over that time I have changed roles from what was originally a customer-focused role into a role with one of the core platform teams. This has meant looking after the majority of the Internal and customer Virtual platforms. During Continue Reading
AWS IOT Button Back Story: My AWS Solution Archictect certification is due to expire in the next 6 months and given I have not done a huge amount with AWS since getting certified I thought it was worth kicking the tyres again and running a few bits and pieces within Continue Reading
A list of useful Nutanix Commands
AWS Lightsail I have been running this blog on top of some of my Infrastructure at home but the performance ( due to my connection) has never been stunning. So I decided to move it over to an AWS Lightsail instance to investigate more about the newer VPS service from Continue Reading
AWS Status Page – Enhancements In a previous post, I deployed a basic AWS status page. The tool I deployed lambstatus supports pulling metrics from AWS Cloudwatch and displaying them. As part of my personal development, I thought I would include this on my status page. I managed to get Continue Reading
Nutanix Life Cycle Manager (LCM) With the introduction of AOS 5, Nutanix introduced Life Cycle Manager (LCM), something that Is one of the best but least known Nutanix features. Put simply it’s part of the Nutanix update mechanism but for dealing with hardware rather than the software components. To me Continue Reading
AWS For Beginners Account Guide
AWS – Serverless Serverless is one of those stupid names within IT that doesn’t really explain whats going on. Its led to the comical meme below But buzzword bingo aside what is it and what can you do with it? Well, my AWS cert is due to expire shortly and I Continue Reading
Cloudflare – What is it and why would I care? I have been using Cloudflare for a long time. It is one of my go-to services and I use it to protect all of the public services I run for myself and other sites/ organizations. The basic premise of what Continue Reading
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: Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
I have been using the Sophos UTM Appliance at home for about 3 years. It has been my internet gateway all this time and also has been useful for the lab I run at home. It’s pretty much the full featured enterprise edition but its limited to 50 IP’s on Continue Reading
I recently got back from an amazing conference in New Orleans. This was the VeeamON conference and I was invited as part of the Veeam Vanguard programme that I am part of. A lot of the UK Vanguards all travelled out together and after numerous discussions, it became clear that a Continue Reading