chris I previously blogged about my SuperMicro based homelab. It performed without issue, however, I was concerned about noise and heat output from the little servers. Had I power and networking available in my garage I might have put them in there but that wasn’t an option. Keeping them cool throughout the winter wasn’t much of … Read more
On one of my more recent projects, I have been involved in helping a customer transition from traditional LUN based VMFS storage on HPE 3PAR over to using VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols). There are plenty of articles on the internet about what VVol based storage is, so I won’t attempt to reinvent the wheel. However … Read more
Previously as self-employed I had been putting off sitting the exam due to the cost, but I joined VMware PSO recently and as an employee I get a few free goes at the exams (before I have to explain myself to my boss!), so I figured I would just get it booked and sit it. … Read more
If you’ve just upgraded macOS to Catalina and now find you can’t access websites with self signed certificates anymore, like I did, you need to add the site certificate into your Keychain. This is due to security changes in Catalina which in short means it gets quite fussy with self signed certificates. For a detailed … Read more
If, like me, you use a Chromium based browser and you are having issues registering your second SRM server to your second vCenter server, you may encounter the above error message, as shown in the screen shot below during the registration process. I spent quite some time digging around in various log files on the … Read more
VMware have been moving away from Windows installs of vCenter Server and 6.7 is going to be the last Windows version (hurrah!). SRM was next in their sights and with the release of 8.2 we can say goodbye to the Windows version and associated license and issues it came with (slow start up for one). … Read more
VMware have released the new version of NSX (6.4.5) on the 18th of April. Full release notes can be read here. One of the frustrating things working with NSX is the requirement to use the old Flex interface to carry out certain functions such as configuring routing on Edge devices. Thankfully 6.4.5 moves one step … Read more
I’m lucky/stupid enough to have reasonably powerful hardware for my home lab. Whilst I am a great advocate of building as much on physical equipment as possible, sometimes hardware costs are prohibitive or overkill to experiment with some new technologies. A new project at work required some work on Cross-vCenter NSX. Since I only had … Read more
Since I have a 10 Gbit switch, I thought I would test to see what sort of network throughput I can get between VMs in two scenarios – one using standard networking and one when connected using NSX logical switches. I have previously done this and noticed that the throughput when using the VTEP vmk’s … Read more
In my opinion, if you’re wanting to learn or sit exams, nothing beats practising on physical equipment. Online material is great, but you really do need to get proper hands on to fully understand all of the technology areas you’re interested in studying and certifying for. My lab has grown somewhat in the past few … Read more