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I just rebuild my home-lab to vSphere 5.5 U2. After setting up the syslog, I noticed 30+ messages popping up coming from my ESXi hosts. It turns out, the default logging level on the hosts is configured as verbose. Normally, this should be perfectly okay especially if you have a syslog server appliance that can make good use of it (eg. LogInsight, splunk) Unfortunately for me, a homelab user, this is eating up both o

Over the weekend, I wanted to try VMware’s SDN solution: NSX… and being the lazy guy that I am- i didn’t read any documentations before going thru the installation. As result – installation wasn’t pretty. Here are the things that stopped me during the setup: IP Pools for the Network Controller not being deployed The IP Pool should relate to the dvPort Group that you chose. Also, the IP s

Official link and information below: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere-beta

With the advent of high capacity machines (1TB RAM, 4×10 CPU)  – consolidation ratio is at its all time high. Unfortunately, maximum/ limitation of other components would easily be reached. One good example: we recently experienced VM’s suddenly disconnecting -NICs getting unchecked- from Nexus1000v. We verified there were a lot of free ports left on the 1000v. After hours of troubleshooting, we fina

*start just geeky things* Don’t you just hate the USB sticking at the back of your home built ESXi  box 🙁 Moving it is a bummer (I know, you can just plug-it out – but I’m lazy) as you need to make sure not to touch the USB stick. ENTER: Internal USB Header (woop woop) I just grabbed this baby off of ebay and now I don’t have to worry bumping the USB at the back. Look at the before and after p

First off …whats so special with Realtek NIC card? The Realtek NIC card is commonly seen in consumer motherboard. If you intend to run a whitebox ESXi for homelab use, tough luck as starting ESXi 5.5 VMWare has removed support to it. But do not fret. There are numerous ways to make it run. A simple google search would yield numerous results pointing to guides on how to side slip the ESXi 5.1 drivers to a ESXi 5

With the news of vCloud Director to be phased out, I wanted to try its replacement: vCenter Automation Center. From the demo all over the web you can already see the user interface to be “friendly” compared to the daunting technical configurations of vCloud Director. To be fair, once you have the hang of vCD its concept is fairly simple. To have a firm grasp how vCAC fair – I’ll try to install

Over the weekend, I reinstalled my home lab to vsphere 5.5. Wanting to automate as much as possible in managing my VM’s – I’ve decided to use vcenter orchestrator. Currently, automation are controlled via PowerShell scripts (more on this on a separate post). The problem with this is manageability/ portability. I wanted to make it more “universal”. Being completely clueless, decided to pl

Working with VSA, here are some gotchas and dvance configs to note when troubleshooting issues involving the setup. 1. Disable Proxy Arp in layer 3 if the VSA Manager and ESXi hosts are in different network. During VSA Cluster creation, the setup would ping each of the IP’s to be used by the appliance and NFS mounts. Since the proxy arp setting in the layer 3 “proxies” replies to any unused IP, this

One advantage in living in a 1st world country: access to cheap 2nd hand hardware! Lurking in HW forums, I manage to snag some nice gear to build my ESXi Lab. I wanted to make it as close as what production setup would like configuration wise. In the end, here’s my configuration I used to prepare for my VCP-CLOUD certification: ESXi Host 5.1 (installed via USB): i3 2100 16GB Memory DDR3 Shared Storage:  Synolog