In this post I’ll walk through how I use vSphere Power Management driven by Ansible and SemaphoreUI to automatically reduce ESXi host electricity consumption — saving real money on my Octopus Agile tariff by toggling hosts between Low Power and Balanced policies. Introudction One of the larger costs of running my homelab is the electricity….
One Bash script turns a fresh Ubuntu VM into a VCF 9 Offline Depot: Traefik, Nginx, basic auth, and Let’s Encrypt wildcard certs via Cloudflare DNS.
Part 2 of my self-hosted AI stack series. I cover container resource sizing, dual-network isolation via Traefik and Cloudflare Tunnels, and every database powering the stack — PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Qdrant, MinIO, MongoDB, SQLite, Prometheus, and Jaeger — plus the backup strategy for each.
We’ve expanded the VMC fleet with the new i7i (i7i.24xlarge) host type. Powered by Intel Emerald Rapids processors with PCIe Gen5 connectivity, it delivers the fleet’s highest single-core performance and memory bandwidth, making it well suited for latency-sensitive workloads and high-performance vSAN configurations. Key Technical Specs: This host brings a blend of usable options to…
A walkthrough of my self-hosted AI stack: Ollama, Open WebUI, ComfyUI, Whishper, n8n, Qdrant, SearxNG, and a full observability layer — all running on my own hardware with Docker Compose.
I am quite a heavy consumer of electricity at home. This is primarily driven by my lab but having a young son and two golden retrievers means more washing and drying. As a result I am always looking to try and reduce the electrical costs as it’s not cheap in the UK. Problem Sadly my…
Learn how to use Ansible to configure an Ubuntu VM for use with NVIDIA based AI workloads in vSphere
How to leverage Content Libraries to deploy into VMware Cloud on AWS faster.
I have spent the Christmas break making some improvements to this blog. A lot of these are in “the backend” These help improve the performance, Privacy, SEO, and I have also added some security best practices. Most of these changes were done more as an exercise than due to a specific requirement. I also had…
How to expand disks from the command line in Ubuntu. This is something I do fairly frequently, and I can never remember the steps. So I decided to write them down. 1. Rescan for disk size changes sudo tee /sys/class/block/sda/device/rescan 2. Extend the physical partition (if needed) sudo growpart /dev/sda 3 3. Resize the physical…
How to use the Amazon Time Sync Service in a VMC environment
How to safety shutdown a vSAN Environment