Over the last 6-9 months, I have been reviewing the vast majority of a new book just released to print by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort – The vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive. This book is, without a doubt, the most in-depth look at host design I have ever read, we are not talking […]
My home datacenter.
I have been meaning to write this for a very long time, finally inspired by seeing Russell Pope’s absolutely insane lab in the vExpert Slack and Mark Brookfield‘s homelab post it started when my lab was a single Dell R710 with 96GB RAM and 2x X5670 procs. The home lab has stopped being a lab […]
Replicating SAN on openSUSE with VAAI
This article was written a few years back, but never published – it was some work I was doing in my lab to try and get to grips around the work involved in creating a SAN with synchronous replication built in from scratch. It in no way should be used for production, but rather as […]
LSI3108 based controllers now VSAN 6.2 Certified
After a long an arduous certification and regression testing process following many problems with LSI 3108 based controllers that I have been using for VSAN they are finally VSAN 6.2 certified.
In need of a multi-OS, bootable USB? Use an Android phone.
I found myself in the position recently whereby I had two hosts I bought off eBay (as one does for labs), they arrived, I had great plans… But no iDRAC Enterprise :( While the iDRAC Ent cards were on their way to me I couldn’t help but want to install ESXi on these things so […]
Deploying Dell OpenManage on ESXi and vCenter 6
If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like […]
Flashing over OEM-R BIOS/Firmware on Dell hardware
I have recently been rebuilding my home lab from scratch (a series of posts on that coming soon), so naturally my first port of call for server hardware was eBay, what self-respecting techie would pay full price for anything… I found an incredible deal on some used Dell R710 servers, so I bought two to […]
Upgrading a legacy ReadyNAS from RAIDiator 4.2.x to 6.2.x
My old ReadyNAS was in need of an update and figured i’d look back into upgrading to OS 6.2.x again, this used to be quite an involved manual process requiring you to access the VGA header on the motherboard. As it turns out Netgear have realised people would get round this anyway and have provided […]
Check action progress on Dell MD3000i array
One of the things that the Dell MD Storage Manager is a progress indicator for rebuild operations or any actions at all really, it’s fairly simple to do, but you have to use the command line tool SMcli.exe that comes with MD Storage Manager. First navigate to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\MD Storage Software\MD Storage Manager\client Then […]
Setting Up Multi-NIC vMotion in vSphere 5.5
Multi-NIC vMotion is a no-brainer configuration for performance: Faster maintenance mode operations Better DRS load balance operations Overall reduction in lead time of a manual vMotion process. It was introduced in vSphere 5.0 and has improved in v5.5 – so let’s get into how to configure it (we’ll be using the vSphere Web Client because […]