Some ramblings usually about computers
Intro I have run a number of systems utilising ZFS since the earliest days of my homelab using Nexenta all the way back in 2010. The image below is my lab at the time with an IBM Head unit that I think had 18GB of RAM 6x450GB SAS drives and Continue Reading
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 deploy Holodeck with Legacy CPU’s
How to Deploy VMware Holodeck on multiple hosts
An Overview of vSAN ESA in VMC
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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