Homelab on iThinkVirtual™

Nested vSphere Home Lab – Part 4 – VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle Deployment & Configuration

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 17:21:45 -0500

Intro

Welcome back! I know it’s been some time since my last post where I covered the deployment of the nested vSphere lab, but I’d like to take a moment to thank you for coming back and supporting me! Life hits at times, and I just didn’t have the time to dedicate to creating content as my family expanded and the responsibilities took over. While time is still of the essence, I didn’t want to miss out on following up the series. In this post, I will cover the deployment and configuration of the VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle appliance to help facilitate the deployment of the remaining Aria Suite solutions. Let’s get to it!

Nested vSphere Home Lab – Part 3 – vSphere 8.x Lab Deployment

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 20:22:55 -0500

Intro

Welcome back! In my previous post, I covered the deployment and configuration of an Active Directory and Microsoft Certificate Authority server(s) for the nested lab environment.

Next, I will cover the steps used to deploy the nested lab via William Lam’s Automated Nested Lab Deployment script. This script makes it easy to deploy a set of vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) VMs, along with a VMware vCenter Server Appliance virtual machine to manage the nested lab environment.

Nested vSphere Home Lab - Part 2 - Active Directory & Certificate Authority

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 21:05:13 -0400

Intro

Welcome back! In my previous post, I covered the deployment and configuration of a virtual Sophos XG Firewall router appliance to provide routing services for the nested lab environment.

Nested vSphere Home Lab – Part 1 – Sophos Firewall

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 21:03:00 -0400

Intro

Welcome to Part 1 of my Nested vSphere Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the gist of what I plan to do for my nested Nested vSphere Home Lab. In this post, I will cover the setup and configuration of a Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition which will serve as the router for my nested lab environment. My physical Home Lab is configured with Virtual Distributed Switches, or VDS (sometimes seen as DVS) for short, and since this is a nested lab environment that will not have any physical uplinks connected, I will need to create a new VDS without physical uplinks connected to it along with a portgroup for the nested environment and then configure access to the environment from my LAN. This can also be configured on a Virtual Standard Switch, or VSS for short, in the same fashion. All network traffic will flow through the virtual router/firewall to communicate to and from the nested lab. Afterward, I’ll cover the Active Directory Server setup.

Nested vSphere Home Lab Series

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 20:37:53 -0400

Intro

Hey there! I’d taken a hiatus from writing as my personal life got in the way…got married, had a child, and changed employer(s), just to name a few!

vRealize Suite 2019 - Part 1: Installing vRealize Lifecycle Manager

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 04:18:58 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 1 of my vRealize Suite 2019 Series. In my previous post, I went over the gist of what I plan to deploy in my nested Home Lab. In this post, I will cover the installation of vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager using the new vRealize Easy Installer released with the v8.0 of the solution.

vRealize Suite 2019 Series

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 04:14:28 -0500

Intro

Hello, and thank you for visiting my blog! I’d decided to take some time away from writing in order to focus on my role as a Solutions Engineer at VMware, and enhance my skillset by getting more acclimated and accustomed to some of the most utilized solutions by VMware customers. Almost one full year has passed since I last wrote anything, and with the new year underway, what better time to get back into writing some material for myself and the vCommunity.

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 6: Upgrading NSX-T

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:25 -0400

Intro

Welcome to Part 6 of my NSX-T Home Lab series. In my previous post, I covered how to configure NSX-T networking to be able to start migrating and running workloads on the NSX-T fabric. In this post, I am going to cover the process of upgrading to the newly released version of NSX-T 2.4. Are you excited? Good!… So am I! Let’s jump right in!

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 5: Configuring NSX-T Networking

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 17:25:44 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 5 of my NSX-T Home Lab series. In my previous post, I went over the lengthy process of configuring the NSX-T fabric. In this post, I am going to cover the process of configuring the networking so we can get the logical routers and logical switches in place and ready to attach VMs to them and begin running workloads on NSX. Let get to it, shall we?

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 4: Configuring NSX-T Fabric

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 15:15:18 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 4 of my NSX-T Home Lab series. In my previous post, I covered the process of deploying the NSX-T appliances and joining them to the management plane to have the foundational components ready for us to continue the configuration. In this post, I will cover all the configurations required to get NSX-T Fabric ready for network configurations in order to run workloads on it. So sit back, buckle up, and get ready for a lengthy read!

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 3: Deploying NSX-T Appliances

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 23:22:25 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 3 of my NSX-T Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the process of setting up the Sophos XG firewall/router VM for my nested lab environment. In this post, we’ll cover the process of deploying the required NSX-T Appliances. There are 3 main appliances that need to be deployed, the first is the NSX-T Manager, followed by a single or multiple Controllers, and lastly, a single or multiple Edge appliances. For the purposes of this nested lab demo, I will only be deploying a single instance of each appliance, but please follow recommended best practices if you are leveraging this series for a production deployment. With all that said, let’s get to it!

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 2: Configuring ESXi VMs

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:11:56 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 2 of my NSX-T Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the installation and configuration of a Sophos XG firewall for my nested NSX-T Home Lab. In this post, I will cover the setup and configuration of the ESXi 6.7 VMs.

NSX-T Home Lab - Part 1: Configuring Sophos XG Firewall

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:10:49 -0500

Intro

Welcome to Part 1 of my NSX-T Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the gist of what I plan to do for my nested NSX-T Home Lab. In this post, I will cover the setup and configuration of a Sophos XG firewall Home Edition which will serve as the router for my nested lab environment. My physical Home Lab is configured with Virtual Distributed Switches, or VDS (sometimes seen as DVS) for short, and since this is a nested lab environment that will not have any physical uplinks connected, I will need to create a new VDS without physical uplinks connected to it along with a portgroup for the nested environment and then configure access to the environment from my LAN. All traffic will flow through virtual router/firewall to communicate to and from the nested lab.

NSX-T Home Lab Series

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 22:09:16 -0500

Intro

I recently upgraded my Home Lab “Datacenter” to support all-flash VSAN and 10Gb networking with the plan to deploy NSX-T so that I can familiarize myself with the solution and use it to better prepare me for the VMware VCP-NV exam certification. Since this is all brand new to me, I’ve decided that I’ll first deploy it in a nested lab environment in order to learn the deployment process as well as to minimize the risk of accidentally messing up my Home Lab environment.

Create an ESXi 6.7 VM Template

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 21:21:31 -0500

Disclaimer: The following is not supported by VMware.

Nested virtualization is nothing new, and many of us use it for test or demonstration purposes since they can quickly be stood up or torn down. William Lam has an ESXi VM which can be downloaded from here, but I wanted to go ahead and create my own for use within my nested lab environments.

Homelab Makeover 2.0

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 01:20:14 -0500

Hello and first off, thank so much for visiting my blog! If you have followed any part of my “Homelab” series, you will be familiar with the components that make up my home “Datacenter”. If not, take some time to catch up on those posts!

Fixing A Corrupt Domain Controller – Stop Code 0x00002e2

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 02:22:23 -0500

Yesterday morning I discovered that my Synology NAS had an unexpected shutdown in the middle of the night while my homelab VMs/workloads were still running. This caused both of my Domain Controllers databases to become corrupt resulting in being unable to boot those machines. When attempting to boot them, they would get stuck in a BSOD boot-loop and would display a Stop Error Code of 0x00002e2.

Home Lab 2017 – Part 1 (Network and Lab Overhaul)

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 18:53:49 -0500

For the last 6+ months, I haven’t had much time to dedicate to my home lab and overall home network. Between holidays, transitioning to a new employer/role, and everyday life getting in the way, I found that I had to put everything on the back burner for a bit…so I inevitably shutdown by home lab. Well now I am back and am looking forward to writing up some new material that I have been meaning to do for a while. I will start this by saying this is a continuation of my Home Lab 2016 Series, now being dubbed as “Home Lab 2017“!

How To: Create A VMFS5 Datastore On A USB Drive

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 21:45:09 -0400

Create A VMFS5 Datastore On A USB Drive

Ever wondered if it was possible to use a USB Drive as a VMFS5 datastore in VMware vSphere 6.0? I sure know that I have! Not that I would like to run any VM’s on said datastore, as I’m sure performance would not be optimal, but instead to test its functionality and use it for storing ESXi host logs for example. Well, I ran into an issue today where I needed to unmount all of my NFS mounts on ESXi 6.0 U2 in order to recreate some of the volumes before remounting them. The problem was that I was unable to unmount one of my volumes because it was bound to the ESXi host for scratch logs. As I didn’t have a spare drive of any sort to attach to my host so that I could reconfigure the location for scratch logs, I began tinkering with the idea of using a small USB drive as a temporary datastore for these logs.

PernixData FVP Freedom Woes With Missing Supermicro System UUID

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 22:44:03 -0400

PernixData FVP Freedom Woes With Missing System UUID

Recently, I’ve been wanting to give PernixData FVP Freedom a run in my HomeLab Datacenter to better familiarize myself with the product and see how much of a performance improvement I’d get if any at all. I’ve heard from so many people how much they love the product so I figured “why not”?

Installing phpIPAM on Ubuntu 16.04

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:46:21 -0400

Installing phpIPAM on Ubuntu 16.04

I have been thinking, for a while now, about deploying an IP Address Management (IPAM) system in my Home Lab environment to keep track of my assigned addresses across my various VLANs. In looking for the right solution, I came across many different choices, from Infloblox to Microsoft’s very own IPAM feature within Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2. I read many articles, and kept seeing rave reviews and tons of praise about phpIPAM and that it was simple to install and get it running (at least that’s how it’s advertised). I went to the phpIPAM website to lookup more information and noticed they have an installation guide available. Upon observing it, I quickly became disappointed at the lack of detailed instructions to actually deploy it on a system. I guess they assume everyone has adequate knowledge of Linux operating systems, but myself personally, I’m still pretty novice at Linux and am looking to become more proficient with it. I figured this is a good opportunity to get some hands-on Linux experience since I already knew how to, at the ver least, install an OS!

Creating a Single-Node VSAN

Mon, 02 May 2016 14:00:54 -0400

Creating a Single-Node VSAN

Many of us homelab enthusiasts tend to build “whitebox” systems from spare PC parts and a few internal hard drives for local storage that we’ve either ordered or had laying around in order install ESXi and run a single-node lab environment. VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) enables the ability to build a local SAN environment utilizing the local hard drives in the host. The only downside/caveat is that you need a minimum of (3) ESXi hosts in a cluster to enable and configure VSAN. Bummer!

Home Lab 2016 – Part 3

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 22:11:29 -0400

Home Lab 2016 – Part 3

Hello all! My sincere apologies for the brief hiatus, but I am back to continue my Home Lab 2016 series. In my previous posts, I covered the components that make up my new Home Lab. In this post I will quickly cover my Storage and Network solutions that connect my lab. Let’s get to it!

Home Lab 2016 – Part 2

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 23:36:15 -0400

Home Lab 2016 – Part 2

Welcome back for Part 2 of my Home Lab 2016 Series. I hope that you enjoyed my previous post, Part 1 from last week, where I covered the basis of my home lab and presented the Bill of Materials (BOM) for my mini-datacenter environment.

Home Lab 2016 – Part 1

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 00:18:50 -0500

Home Lab 2016 – Part 1

Having a home lab is every IT enthusiasts dream come true, and now I can finally say that I have fulfilled that dream! I previously was (and currently still am…) using a 1-node “white box” system I had built from a spare gaming machine I had laying around, running on an open-air tech bench from TopDeck. It’s comprised of the following: