How-To's 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 3: Installing vRealize Automation

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 21:56:02 -0500

Intro

In my previous post, I covered the configuration of VMware Identity Manager in preparation for what I will cover in this post, the installation of vRealize Automation 8.0! This new release is a complete redesign of the product and now uses a similar codebase to vRealize Automation Cloud (formerly known as Cloud Automation Services), bringing those capabilities to the on-premises form factor and making it easier to transform IT delivery. I look forward to tinkering with this more after the deployment! Let’s jump right in!

vRealize Suite 2019 – Part 2: Configuring VMware Identity Manager

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 04:42:40 -0500

Intro

In my previous post, I covered how to install vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0 and in the process it also deployed an instance of VMware Identity Manager aka Workspace One Access, which is a requirement for installing vRealize Automation 8.0. I opted to skip the deployment of the latter as to keep focus on the deployment of LCM only.

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.

VMware Software Manager: The Good...The Bad...The Alternative!

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 18:00:51 -0500

In this post, I am going to discuss a little, “not-so-well-known” utility, called VMware Software Manager. This little “beast” was first released as v1.0 back on 2015-03-12, and its most current release, v1.5, came out on 2016-08-25. So as you can see, it’s been quite a while since this tool has seen a new update release. The problem now is that this utility seems to have been forgotten and/or neglected by VMware, but I will get into more of that a little later. Let’s start off with the positive stuff.

Install PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI on Ubuntu

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 20:55:41 -0500

Just a few days ago, PowerShell Core v6.0 was released for Windows, Linux, and macOS systems. Alongside this release came the release of VMware PowerCLI 10.0.0.78953 which is VMware’s own “PowerShell-like” utility.

Install PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI on CentOS

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 18:27:18 -0500

Install PowerShell and VMware PowerCLI on macOS

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 05:57:43 -0500

Deploy A Virtual Appliance Using PowerCLI

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 22:53:08 -0500

Hello all and thank you for visiting my blog! In today’s post, I am going to cover how to deploy a VMware virtual appliance (.ova) using PowerCLI. “Why?” you asked? Well, because scripting and automation via PowerCLI is fun and awesome! Sure, it’s simple enough to deploy an appliance natively within the vSphere Web Client by selecting the .ova that you’d like to import, press a few mouse clicks, enter some info, and off you go! But who wants to do stuff the easy way? It takes the fun away!

vSphere…Synology…NFS v4.1

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 03:39:14 -0500

Welcome, and thanks for visiting my blog!

In this post, I am going to cover how to enable NFS v4.1 on a Synology device and then mount and NFS v4.1 datastore in VMware vSphere 6.5. By default, Synology devices support NFS v4 natively, and although they can also support NFS v4.1, it is not enabled. Well, not to worry because I am going to show you just how to enable the feature on your device.

macOS 10.13 High Sierra on ESXi 6.5

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 21:42:25 -0500

NOTE: This is completely for experimental purposes and is unsupported by both Apple and VMware

Hello all! This is just a quick follow up to my previous guide on running macOS 10.12 Sierra on ESXi 6.x, where I have now successfully updated the VM to macOS 10.13 High Sierra.

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.

Create a macOS/OS X VM on VMware ESXi 6.5 & VMware Workstation 12.x

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 06:15:42 -0500

Create a macOS/OS X VM on VMware ESXi 6.5 & VMware Workstation 12.5.2 Pro

NOTE: This is completely for experimental purposes and is unsupported by both Apple and VMware

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!

Create a Synology VM with XPEnology

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 05:44:02 -0400

Create a Synology VM with XPEnology

I’m a huge fan of Synology NAS systems, but I must say, they do often put a gaping hole in your wallet. Well, fortunately the folks over at XPEnology have created an alternative way for us to create your own Synology devices, whether it be deployed on a bare-metal system or as a virtual machine. I currently own a few Synology NAS devices, but I love having the ability to spin up a working VM version quickly and with ease, for use in my nested lab environments.

Configure OpenDNS on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

Sun, 27 Mar 2016 15:46:36 -0400

I recently picked up a new router/firewall for my home, and chose the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite (ERLite-3). This device comes with a lot of bells and whistles and if you would like more information on it, please see here.

Intel NIC not detected by ESXi

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 03:48:41 -0400

Intel NIC Not Detected by ESXi

In this post I am going to cover a random issue I encountered after installing ESXi 6.0 Update 2 on one of my new Home Lab 2016 hosts. The actual installation of ESXi was extremely easy and painless (I may cover that in another post). After I had completed the installation, I was attempting to configure my Management network interfaces and suddenly noticed that only 4 network interfaces were being detected!