Hi, This post is all about what my lab currently looks like on April 3rd, 2025 and why I made the decision to rent two relatively powerful dedicated servers instead of building out a cluster. To get the boring part out of the way, the reason is because it's easier to spend a bit extra per month than to purchase two …

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In this post I will share a quick tip on how I've managed to deploy a VCF Workload Domain with a single NSX Manager, instead of the standard three. Warning Do not use this trick on production. Neither Broadcom nor me support this deployment. This is purely for testing with limited resources, you have been warned! The …

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Recently while I was trying to update a new homelab server from ESXi 8 to ESXi 8 U3b using the command esxcli software vib update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/<datastore>/depot.zip, I stumbled upon the following error: Profile <> is missing component(s) ESXi,Mellanox-nmlx5. After trying to remove the installed VIBs (that are …

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This is about an issue I encountered in my lab recently. This issue affects vCenter version 8 U2 build 22617221 If you see that cloning VMs and powering on VMs takes forever and they get stuck at 95% and 66% respectively, but eventually finishes after an hour, you can check if you are affected by this issue. Go to the …

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With power pricing getting severely out of hand (well, it has been for months now), I figured I should do my part. Currently, my lab consists of four ESXi servers, two storage servers, one backup server and one personal tinkering server. My ESXi cluster has always ran on about 1.5 hosts worth of redundancy. In order to …

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Hi everyone, For this post, we’re going to look into all the gear I have in my lab. Note that these are all links and prices that I paid for at the time. Let’s start with compute. I will list a table here of the servers. NOTE: This BoM is outdated and is yet to be updated pending upgrades that I'm saving up for. …

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Hi everyone, Time for a new blog post about the adventure I’ve been having for the past two days. On June 2nd, my server, a DL380G6 started to suddenly take-off. The fans were roaring at 70%, and the temperature sensor near the PCI Riser was showing 110 C. Of course this is not supposed to happen, in this blog post, I …

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