After spending a bit of time tidying up cables in my rack, I figured I’d take the opportunity to write about my current setup. Here it is in all its glory: Not the greatest picture. From top to bottom: Here’s a diagram of how it’s all connected together. Not in the diagram is a UniFi … Read more
My homelab currently comprises of 3x Intel NUC Extremes (11th gen, 1x i9, 2x i7) along with 2x Xeon workstation based hosts. Whilst I like the NUCs, I’ve been wanting to replace the Xeon workstations. They started off in a Dell SFF workstation, but due to heat management issues I removed the CPUs and I’ve … Read more
HC 4.10 has just been released and with it come a whole host of excellent new features. You can read the release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/4.10/rn/vmware-hcx-410-release-notes/index.html In this post, I want to concentrate on what will be welcome to customers who operate their own private datacentres and have no use for encryption. Historically, the traffic between … Read more
Although I have previously documented my homelab, there have been some changes as well as a housemove. This is part 1 of my 2023 update. This is how it was around a week ago, and as you can see it’s a bit of a mess. The Lack ‘Rack’ was only tempoary and I’ve had it … Read more
HCX OS Assisted Migration is a migration method within HCX where we can move supported guest OS VMs from a Hyper-V or KVM environment. The process to do so is once you have a functioning Service Mesh, you download a Sentinel agent and then install it on the VMs in scope for migration. Shortly afterwards, … Read more
I’ve been using a HP Z640 Workstation as the core of my homelab for some time. It’s been excellent – it’s quiet, it’s easy to work in, it’s certainly not slow but then it’s not going to set any records. It has become tiresome only having a single host, such as managing updates as I … Read more
This is the first part in a series of blog posts about VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS, concentrating on how to set up a site to site VPN to VMC on AWS and then how to migrate on-prem workloads to it. VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS is a fully managed vSphere environment in collaboration with … Read more
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
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
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