After careful consideration I decided on what to buy for my first homelab server as explained in part 1. Having used corporate laptops as my daily driver for the better part of the last two decades I seriously can’t remember when I last built a PC. So using a barebones Read more…
Although this blog is mosty centered arount VMware related topics I sometimes find myself presented with other challenges in the field. In this case I needed to upgrade a couple of Windows domain controllers to Windows Server 2019. However because the existing servers were bare metal and I had no Read more…
The coming months I’ll be focussing a lot on education and certification and for this purpose having access to a lab environment is crucial. Now, I used to have the luxury of having a couple of blade servers at work that I could use for this but as I switched Read more…
Lately I’ve been running some Storage Spaces Direct labs on VMware workstation. Part of doing labs means testing things until something breaks and as a countermeasure I tend to create snapshots frequently. Now this led me to an issue that I haven’t seen anyone write about online. It turns out Read more…
Just a small ESXi Pro tip this time. I recently had a host that was experiencing issues and the management services were unresponsive. This is a major problem for troubleshooting as the esxcli commandset won’t work anymore at this stage. Now by accident I came across a tip from the Read more…
With the worldwide outbreak of the coronavirus the Folding@home project has seen a massive influx of new users donating their computer’s idle CPU cycles to run simulations of protein dynamics in order to help find treatments for diseases such as coronavirus, cancer, alzheimer’s, and more. The people of VMware were Read more…
Recently I’ve been involved with a project that required the use of physical mode raw device mappings (pRDM) on vSphere. We weren’t thrilled with the prospect to deploy these pRDMs. Now why would that be you might ask? Well, as a cloud service provider you want maximum agility when it Read more…
Quick post of something I ran into this week. When creating new VMs it makes sense to create disks that have a certain size in GB. But sometimes when migrating workload from one platform to another you might see some funky hard disk sizes like this. {@{Name=Hard disk 1; CapacityGB=49,875}, Read more…
We recently noticed some hosts in our environment that show an alert triggered by ‘Status of other host hardware objects’. Upon further investigation it turned out that this was caused by the system event log (SEL) that is about to run out of space. Now if you don’t mind not Read more…
Recently I had to do just that when a customer I recently on-boarded to our vSphere platform was having issues creating a VSS-aware backup. Even a quiesced snapshot command failed with an error. This issue took quite some time to investigate. And I was lucky enough to have a support Read more…