Homelab

A little while back I was playing around with the CDP feature coming in Veeam Backup & Recovery V11. One of the requirements to use it is installing an I/O Filter on your ESXi hosts. The filter is how the magic happens, and there is nothing unusual about this step. Many vendors have I/O Filters available for ESXi . But given that this is a homelab, I tend to do a lot silly things in there. In my case, I found that I was unable to vMotion a VM, which led me down a rabbit hole … ...

In addition to a couple of recent conversations with peers, a recent comment on a post on my site lead to a bit of a conversation around home labs and setups. Rather than going back and forth via comments, I figured I would write down some thoughts as a post. If nothing else, it will be easier to share and reference going forward. WHAT SHOULD MY LAB LOOK LIKE? Perfection is the enemy of progressIt depends …. But seriously, it depends on what you are trying to learn. If you are looking to learn about Active Directory and SQL Server, it will look a lot different if you are looking to learn more about vRealize Automation, for example. ...

I recently sat and passed the VCP6-NV exam, and I figured since I spent a lot of time reading about other people’s exam experience, I would share mine as well. An important note is that there are two versions of this exam (as of this writing). The older exam is based on NSX 6 and was retired on April 30, 2017. This is noteworthy because a lot of the study material out there is based on the older exam. The general consensus online seems to be that it won’t hurt to review it, but if newer material is available, you might as well use that. ...

Earlier this year I decided that I wanted to renew my VCP cert via a different track (as opposed to getting a VCAP). The reason being is that I was just looking to broaden my knowledge. I don’t do a lot of super technical work on the daily basis, so something like the VCAP might be “overkill” (for lack of a better term). It was a toss-up between the VCP-NV and VCP-DTM. In the end, DTM won out. ...

Earlier this year I set some goals for myself, one of which was certification-related. For the sake of learning something new and with my VMware VCP-DCV expiring later this year, I want to try and recertify on a different track. It has been a bit of a toss-up between VMware NSX and VMware Horizon, but given that I implemented Horizon at work recently, I will be going that route. My home lab consisted of three Intel NUCs, which is great, however, I was running into some issues. First off, I seemed to keep running into all-flash vSAN issues. I suspect this is related to the Intel NVMe’s that I’m using. It also doesn’t help that my hardware isn’t on the HCL, but I haven’t dug too deep into it. The second issue that I found was that although three hosts are great, a fourth would be helpful, even if just for management. Despite having a FreeNAS that I use for shared storage, running it over 1 GbE isn’t ideal. With that in mind, I knew that I needed to solve storage issues first, followed by a fourth host, if possible. ...

I recently posted about the process I took to get data from an old FreeNAS to a new one. Truth be told, that process did work (and reasonably well), but I ended up tweaking things a bit more … actually a lot more. I won’t go into details about it, as it isn’t really relevant, but as I was mucking about, I found myself running a handful of commands over and over. ...

I recently spun up a new homelab using an Intel NUC, which I love. The foot print is small, you can jam a bunch of RAM and a decent CPU in there, and the power draw is minimal. One of the things I wanted to accomplish with my NUC is the ability to bring it places, whether it be for demos, or just for toying with while I am out of the house. ...

Recently there has been some talk on Twitter about ‘Making VMUG Great Again’. Along with that, there have been a couple of great blog posts by Alastair Cooke and Eric Siebert, which I recommend you read. I’ve been following the conversation, albeit usually a good 12 hours or so late. https://twitter.com/DemitasseNZ/status/719651965383213056 I wanted to add my $.02 to the topic, but I don’t think Twitter is a great medium for this (largely due to me ‘missing’ the conversations). As a recent first-time co-presenter I was excited to finally be part of a presentation. I have been attending VMUG UserCons for years, and local user group meetings when possible. I have always wanted to contribute back, but I never have until recently. So what changed? In short, I was invited by Rick Vanover to co-present his session. I eagerly accepted. ...

VMware has been pushing their vCloud product for quite a while now, but the uptake doesn’t seem to be there when compared to other hosted cloud services like AWS and Azure. With the recent addition of vCloud Air to the VMUG Advantage program, I decided to take a look at what it has to offer. I’ve dabbled with some AWS and Google stuff in the past, but I haven’t had the opportunity (or real desire to be honest) to play around with vCA. ...