In Part I of this series, I went through the thought process behind my new machine build and in Part II, I documented what was purchased based on those decisions and how much it costed. In this last part of the series, I'll go through some of the build issues that would help you in case [...]
In the previous post, I explained the need for a new machine in my home lab and the considerations before buying appropriate components to build one. In this post, I will look at the "Physical Decision Points" and the "Bill of Materials" (read "damage") for those components. So, without further ado, let's start: Physical Decision [...]
A few months back, I started to think about having another machine built for my lab as the one I built about year and a half ago, was starting to become a bit cramped. There are a lot of things going on these days and you do need to have enough of a lab to [...]
We all know that Network I/O Control is your friend when it comes to production deployments of vSphere in general. Today, I quickly wanted to make a point that NIOC is also great when it comes to home labs and why we should have it enabled, if possible. A few days back, I was deploying [...]
Recently, I was building a nested ESXi environment in my lab, based on vSphere 5.5. Regular readers will remember that I generally use VMware Workstation (version 10, in this case) to run my virtual environment. I usually have my ESXi hosts configured with 8 NICs, which is pretty handy when I have to play with [...]
In my previous post, I mentioned that I use StarWind Software's iSCSI SAN software to provide iSCSI LUNs for my home lab. In this post, I'll document the process to create a simple shared iSCSI LUN setup. Using that, one can provide as many LUNs as required to an ESXi setup, possibly with multipathing - [...]
In the past couple of years, the term "cloud services" has become very fashionable. Every company wants to be on it. So, even if your day-to-day job is not virtualization, it still makes sense to know about it. Now, even though a cloud service is just a platform outside your own private environment, to someone [...]