A quick one this: After recovering from a hung VMware Workstation host, I was booting up the virtual machines and on one of them, I saw the following error: Failed to lock the file. Cannot open the disk <disk name> or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Module DiskEarly power on failed. Failed [...]
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 [...]
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 - [...]
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 [...]
Recently, I built a new machine for my lab (for those interested in the story, here are Parts I, II and III). I put a 512GB SSD in the new machine with the aim to thin-provision all virtual machines but still get good performance, due to the high number of IOPS/read/write you get from SSDs. Once [...]
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 [...]
In my last post, I discussed the things that are important to me when I am considering to build a new machine for my lab and my reasons for choosing certain options when building a new one. I promised to report on what I bought and built after making the decisions above and how it went, [...]