Last year, when I heard that Ravello Systems are offering free access to vExperts, I was amazed at the offer. https://twitter.com/AtherBeg/status/611730991963598849 Even though I have a fairly good sized lab in my study, there are many times when I want to play with some cool new technology but don't have the time or expertise to [...]
Whenever a new vSphere version comes out, I upgrade at least one of my clusters to it but when I get a chance, also install a new fresh one. So, the time has come for me to build a fresh vSphere 6 cluster. Normally, I just do an install with all the standard things done [...]
I happen to have two Synology boxes in my lab (DS213+ and DS412+) and I try to keep them updated as much as I can. Recently, DSM 5.1 was released which applies to both of them so this weekend, I took a few minutes to update both of my devices. DSM 5.1 brings a lot [...]
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 [...]
Like all VMware techies, I have also installed shared storage in different ways, to experiment with high-availability solutions. One thing that has always bugged me is that virtual appliances providing shared storage, need to have the virtual environment running as a prerequisite. In a home lab, one might not have an external NAS box so [...]
In the first and second posts of this series, I covered my thought process for deciding what hardware and software to use for my new lab machine and then what I actually bought and built, respectively. In this last post of the series, I intend to cover some optimizations I did after the build, some [...]