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…
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. With this setup I always…
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 that I wanted to suggest….
Learn how host failures are handled within VMC
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…
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…
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 the storage platform with vSphere…
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 indefinitely. Organisations still need to…
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 AWS and VMware’s SRE teams…
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 the core AWS services has…
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…
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 do a separate list of…