I have struggled to find an end to end comprehensive guide on deploying VCF for home lab use. Generally I prefer blogs for this sort of thing, because a blog will tell me exactly how to get the application up and running, but not necessarily explain all the bells and whistles. That’s what the formal…
Category: Home Lab
Documents and guides on how I setup my home lab
GenAI Driven Blog
I’m starting to test out GenAI tools, and am thinking about using it for Blog content generation and automated review. I’ve heard good things about this before, so I want to see how it can help my content. To begin, i’ve created a new blog at Tech Generative AI by ChatGPT Most if not all…
Clone a Nested ESXi VM for Nested vSphere Lab Environments
Update. Don’t clone an esxi VM to create a nested environment. There is a better way! Use a kickstart script and install it directly from the ISO.When I originally started this blog post, I thought the best/only way to create a bunch of esxi vms for nesting, was to do it via cloning. I had…
Upgrading to 10Gb links between the SuperMicros
Background Ok so I’ve had my home lab for a couple years at this point, and overall I’m impressed. I have had a ton of workloads on these things from vSphere, vSAN, vCenter, NSX-T, NSX ALB (Avi Networks), Tkgs (vCenter and Tanzu), and Tkgm (Standalone Tanzu). I’ve also installed various firewalls, and DNS tools like…
Upgrading the ESXi Node from vSphere7 to vSphere 8
It’s time to upgrade my physical ESXi hosts. They’re still running the older vSphere7 when I installed it last year. Honestly, vSphere 7 has been great, but it’s important to me to stay with the latest code, especially in lab environments. This will be a quick blog post, since the process is relatively easy. Downloading…
ESXi Power Management Setting
It’s also worth setting the physical ESXIs in your home lab to run on a High Performance setting. The default is Balanced, and after modifying mine to High performance, I am definitely seeing a performance improvement.
Home Lab – Deploy vyos Router
The vyos router will be deployed inside vCenter and it’s sole function is to route between your home network and the NSX-T network. We will configure iBGP between the two, so that any new segments you add in NSX-T will auto populate to the vyos router. Likewise, we will NAT on the vyos, so that…
Home Lab – Create NSX Distributed Switch
In order for NSX-T to run properly, we need to first create a distributed switch in vCenter and add to it, the esxi hosts. From VMware: NSX Virtual Switch is based on vSphere distributed switches (VDSs), which provide uplinks for host connectivity to the top-of-rack (ToR) physical switches. Add a distributed switch in vCenter Add…
Home Lab – NSX-T Troubleshooting
If you’ve made it this far and you’re still seeing errors in your lab (as I did) then there are a few things you should look for. DNS NTP MTU DNS I would ssh into all the components we’ve created (esxis, nsx-mgr, edge, vyos, etc…) and do some digs and nslookups. If any of them…
Home Lab – Deploy NSX-T Manager and Edge
Since our lab will be running NSX, we’ll need to deploy the NSX Manager and do some configuration. Then we’ll deploy one NSX Edge, and test connectivity to a segment. Deploy NSX-T Manager Download NSX-T Manager Download the ISO file from VMware, should see a file like this: nsx-unified-appliance-3.2.1.0.0.19801963.ova Deploy the NSX-T Manager OVA Standard…