Home Lab Stage III
3. September 2021

irg-NET-Lab 3.0 U1

Following on from the major update, we start with the topic of VMware vMotion. Live migration (vMotion) in ESX allows a virtual machine to move between two different hosts. Live storage migration (Storage vMotion) enables live migration of virtual disks on the fly. For more Information: https://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server.html & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCenter Since I purchased the larger server, I had the opportunity to finally replace the HP Microserver […]

Home Lab Stage III
17. August 2021

irg-NET-Lab 3.0

Welcome to the 2nd major update of my Home Lab. In the last small update we talked about resource limitations, which we will break now. I have purchased a HP DL380p Gen8 12 LFF with 12x 3.5″ disk bays, 64GB memory, 4x 1Gbit Ethernet as well as 1x 1Gbit iLO with a datastore of 4TB. First task: implement and discover VMware vCenter. vCenter Server is […]

Home Lab Stage II
12. August 2021

irg-NET-Lab 2.0 U1

In this small update I have made a spatial separation of the microservers. Just as it should be in medium-sized companies. For this I purchased two identical HP 1810-24G switches, equipped them with 2x 1 Gbit transceivers and connected them via fiber optic cable (LACP). Link to the successor switch HPE 1820-24G: https://amzn.to/3CB1HeO The VMware vSphere server was in the living room and the backup […]

Home Lab Stage II
4. August 2021

irg-NET-Lab 2.0

Welcome to the first major update of my Home Lab. In the last update I presented you a productive environment with running applications. Next to this environment a backup strategy should not be missing. For this purpose, I have purchased another HP Microserver Gen8, on which Microsoft Windows Server 2016 is running natively. As a backup strategy, Veeam came into question for me. Veeam offers […]

Home Lab Stage I
4. August 2021

irg-NET-Lab 1.0 U2

The previously mentioned poor wireless LAN quality was optimized in this home lab update. There were several wireless LAN access point and repeater manufacturers to choose from. I decided for a homogeneous infrastructure and therefore the FRITZ!WLAN Mesh Repeater 3000 came into question and lo and behold, the wireless LAN quality is now at 100%. You can find the link to the repeater below. I […]

Home Lab Stage I
31. July 2021

irg-NET-Lab 1.0 U1

After discovering VMware vSphere 6.7, I started to implement first applications on the hypervisor. One was Pi-hole, based on Linux, in my case a Debian 9 VM, which acted as a tracking- and ad-blocker as well as an optional DHCP server. On the other hand – FreeNAS a free operating system (FreeBSD) for Network Attached Storage (NAS). For this I built a corresponding FreeBSD VM. […]

Home Lab Stage I
30. July 2021

irg-NET-Lab 1.0

It all started with an HP Microserver Gen8 and VMware ESXi 6.7. One of my colleagues recommended to start with this constellation and that would be my recommendation for anyone out there who wants to get their first experiences with VMware and professional hardware. The HP Microserver Gen8 is the ideal entry into the server world, which comes with 4x 3,5″ SATA slots, 2x 1Gbit […]

Blog VMware
21. July 2021

How to Downgrade VMware Hardware Version

Do you have a VM with a too high hardware version, which can’t be migrated to an older VMware ESXi host? And the rest of your environment is running on the latest VMware vSphere version i.e. you’ve upgraded to the latest version of vCenter Server, ESXi, VMware Tools? I’ll show you a way to make the VM compatible again. I bought a HPE ML310e Gen8 […]

Blog Dell EMC
2. July 2021

How to RASR Reset Dell EMC VxRail 7.0 Node

There are several reasons why you have to factory reset a VxRail node, for example: creating a new cluster a fresh install is failing Here is an easy step by step guide – how to RASR reset a Dell EMC VxRail 7.0 node. Before we start please remember that you are going to take the node back to factory reset. Do not perform a RASR […]

Blog Dell EMC
2. July 2021

Dell EMC VxRail 7.0 – Useful Log File Information

The following log files can be accessed either via console or SSH to VxRail Manager. Monitor Dell EMC VxRail bring-up logs: dayone.log , short.term.log & firstboot.log: dayone.log – detailed information in relation to initial first run configuration. (/var/log/microservice_log/dayone.log) short.term.log – micro services related information. (/var/log/microservice_log/short.term.log) Note: short.term.log is a good starting point for all microservices related information. For specific microservice log detail filter by the microservices name for example: firstboot.log […]