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
Advanced Deploy VMware vSphere 7.x 3V0-22.21N
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
VMware – Going out with a Bang!
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
Runecast Remediation Script’s
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
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 Continue Reading
VMC Useful Links
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
Lab Update – Desired Workloads
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
Lab Update – Compute
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
VMC Host Errors
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
VMware Certified Master Specialist HCI 2020
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
Monitoring VMC – Part 1
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
NFS 4.1
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
vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager – Environment
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