Introduction As I find myself using Kubernetes (k8s) and container technologies more and more frequently I wanted a way to easily deploy clusters in my homelab environment so I could try out new features and capabilities (as well as get a better understanding of Kubernetes generally). In particular I wanted to make the …

Recently I've been testing out various NAS configurations in my homelab environment - I was particularly keen to get TrueNAS Scale (TNS) working with physical and virtual VMware ESXi hosts. I'd used NFS before from TNS to ESXi servers but found performance somewhat lacking (even when using NVMe or SSD storage) and …

As someone familiar with VMware and vCenter, but coming reasonably fresh to Proxmox Virtual Edition (PVE) there are a number of important differences when configuring High Availability (HA) compared with a VMware environment. In particular, I was surprised to find in a cluster configuration was the default behaviour of …

In part 1 of this series I looked at creating the VMs, installing and updating Proxmox VE (PVE) on them and configuring local storage and networking for each VM to form a fully functional PVE cluster running as VMs running on a VMware vSphere ESXi platform. In this second part of the series I'll continue to configure …

Over the last few years Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) has been gaining a lot of interest as a way of easily managing virtual machines and container images using Open Source software and the Linux KVM hypervisor. In my home lab I was keen to try out the latest (v8.1.3) PVE environment including advanced networking …

VMware Cloud Director (VCD) has the ability to use an Apache Cassandra database to store metrics on VM performance and then make these metrics available so that tenants can view the historic performance of their VMs: Installing a Cassandra cluster for use by VCD is reasonably straightforward and requires a minimum of 4 …

Back in 2019, Tom Fojta wrote an excellent guide on configuring NSX Load Balancer in front of a VMware Cloud Director (VCD) cluster. As I was in the process of rebuilding my home lab environment I wanted to try this out - eventually I'll probably use the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (formerly known as AVI), but I don't …

I previously wrote here and here about using the new VMware Cloud Director (VCD) API tokens functionality first introduced in version 10.3.1 to allow scripts and automation to connect to a VCD environment. With the update to VMware PowerCLI version 13.1 the previous way of achieving this is deprecated as the …

In my home lab I've used many different platforms over the years to host container and VM workloads, often I find I need to move VMs between different hypervisors. In this post I'll detail the steps I used to move some virtual machines from TrueNAS Scale (which uses zVol storage for VM disks and KVM as a hypervisor to …