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3 weeks ago i decided to bite the bullet in building a new iteration of my homelab. Maintaining 4 separate machines (see Homelab v 2.0) is starting to be a burden as most of my time is spent  maintaining the hardware. With inspiration from /r/homelab (reddit.com), I wanted to  build an  “all-in-one” machine – with as much memory as possible. Put enough compute in one machine and just create nested E

Good news! https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/19/lets-encrypt-is-trusted.html

Posting my long overdue specs I use for homelab.  Current iteration served me well in simulating customer scenario and playing with different specs. This are built from (mostly) commercially available components. Items are picked so i can do VSAN simulations as well. Hypervisor ESXi01 i5 2400 32GB Memory P8Z77-M Pro LSI 9211-4i (1 x 128GB SSD, 1 x 500GB SATA) Intel Quad-port NIC ESXi02 i5 2400 32GB Memory P8H67-M LSI

Recently encountered the error when trying to browse the configuration page of vRealize Orchestrator SSL received a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key in Server Key Exchange handshake message. (Error code: ssl_error_weak_server_ephemeral_dh_key)   Quick Workaround from VMware: – Update CIPHER suites accepted by Orchestrator server LOCATION: /etc/vco/app-server/server.xml /etc/vco/configuration/server.xml FR

Just wanted to share what I normally do when I need to reinstall/ install a new ESXi instance for my home lab. Normally, you have to use Rufus or any tools that can create a bootable USB. For me, I just use VMware Workstation to directly write to my USB. you just have to target the USB as the whole Physical Drive, mount the ISO, and install away! Steps: Create VM In the Wizard, use Entire Disk WARNING: Make sure to t

Quick post on how to change IP of vRealize Orchestrator via VAMI (Virtual Appliance Management Interface): 1. go to /opt/vmware/share/vami 2. Initiate ./vami_set_network <interface> STATICV4 <IP> <NETMASK> <GATEWAY>  

ugh.. I was testing different DD-WRT builds on my Buffalo wzr-hp-g300nh and accidentally bricked it.   Good thing — i’m not alone in this and friendly post from below helped me recover it. (weee!)   Here’s the link: http://g300nh.blogspot.com/2010/06/firmware-flash-and-brick-recovery.html Take-away commands for the night: – netsh interface ipv4 add neighbors 12 192.168.11.1 00-1d-12-

Over the week, I was asked to prepare a POC that uses vRealize Automation to provision AWS workloads. Being a AWS noob, I had to reference few articles to get this going. Here are the steps to help you: Using: vRealize Automation 6.2.1 AWS Sign-up Create an AWS Account. You’ll be needing Credit Card information for this. After the Account Creation – you need to wait a maximum of 24 hours before you can st

Upgraded PSU to Platinum 760Watts for my FreeNAS Storage. As the VM’s are growing, I can’t afford to loss any data due to bad power so I opted to upgrade the PSU  🙂     New PSU with younger brother (Platinum and Value-Series     Oh yeah.. and also, I hacked (literally) my PCI-E NIC card since it’s hitting one of the Heatsink >< (ghetto PCI-E to normal PCI conversion):  

There have been numerous advancement in ZFS over the years and it’s time for me to revisit this just in time for my VMware Lab revamp (more on this in a future post!). My 3 year old Synology DS412+ is not just cutting it in keeping up with the workloads I’ve been churning in from the 3 x ESXi hosts. Previous Setup Synology DS412+ 3 x 2 TB WD RED running RAID5 1 x 1GB NIC serving NFS 1 x 1GB NIC for genera