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I have been meaning to get to this little project for a while, and here we are. You can find a link to the site below, I like this initial in your face message though, this tells me that this tool is going to tell me something about my Kubernetes cluster that I didn’t know, for the record I am going to download and run this on my home lab cluster and see what we get. This is not a production cluster! So what is it… KubeBuddy powered by KubeDeck helps you monitor, analyze, and report on your Kubernetes environments with ease. Whether you’re tracking cluster health,Read More →

Some of you may have heard of RAG, retrieval augmented generation? If you want to use an LLM to answer questions about data it wasn’t trained on, you can use the RAG pattern to supplement it with extra data. But before we get into RAG, I wanted to touch on Vector Databases a little as they have become popular with the world of AI. TLDR; A Vector Database is fantastic at cataloging how different pieces of data are related to each other. What is a Vector? Vectors are arrays of numbers and when those arrays represent something we call them embeddings. The term vector reallyRead More →

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As with most Mondays, we start with a job and task in mind but quickly as we begin catching up on news from the weekend, we find some interesting rabbit holes to investigate. This Monday morning was no different but I also do not usually have the urge to share such information. As you all know AI is everywhere, I mean if you do not have a chatbot can you even spell AI!? My morning started with reading up on a tool called ‘kubectl-cli’ from Google – https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/kubectl-ai I had seen others doing similar things so was intrigued when Google come out with a project,Read More →

I have been concentrating a lot this year on my home lab, in previous posts I have covered the set up but basically I have a 5 node Talos Kubernetes cluster with rook-ceph as my storage layer and I needed some monitoring for my home lab. In a VM I am running Veeam Backup & Replication and I wanted to get some hands-on with Grafana, I have more plans but this was project #1 My good friend Jorge has been years into the Grafana dashboards for Veeam. You can find one of the dashboards here. The Plan: We are going to use our Kubernetes clusterRead More →

Over the last few weeks I have been lifting, shifting and reshaping some of the home lab and within that process we needed some more templates for both Windows and Linux. I found an amazing project GitHub Repo – vmware-samples/packer-examples-for-vsphere And Documentation can be found here This will give you the ability to quickly get some Linux and Windows templates up and running quickly in your vSphere environment. My advice from the start is do not use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) but that could be my own user error. I am using an Ubuntu server in my home lab to perform these tasks andRead More →

This has been on my product bucket list for a while, in fact this initial feature request went in on the 9th September 2021. My reasons then were not sales orientated, I was seeing the Kubernetes community using the trusty Raspberry PIs as part of a Kubernetes cluster at home. By supporting in my eyes this architecture it would have opened the door to the home users, technologists and community to having a trusted way to protect the learning environment at home. Here we are 3 years on and we got the support. I have a single node k3s cluster running on a single RaspberryRead More →

Just another dot release at the end of a busy year… the second dot release this year and as I review the 12.3 what’s new document that for Veeam Backup & Replication so minus Veeam ONE we are looking at 14 pages! I want this post to be a quick look at some of the features and hopefully I can get into some of these areas in more dedicated posts. Platform Support (Windows Server 2025) It’s a very standard thing for Veeam to include platform support updates in these releases. Microsoft ignite only happened a few weeks back where Windows Server 2025 was announced andRead More →

*As the title suggests in this post we are going to be talking about the upstream project KubeVirt, KubeVirt as a standalone project release and the protection of these VMs is not supported. It is only today supported for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation (OCP-V) and Harvester from SUSE. This is based on all the varying hardware KubeVirt can be deployed on. With that caveat out of the way in a home lab, we are able to tinker around with whatever we want. I am also clarifying that I am using the 5 nodes that we have available for the community to protect these virtual machines.Read More →

More and more clusters have data appearing on them in the Kubernetes world. Either via a StatefulSet, Operator or at least closely tied to a managed database external to the cluster. But in the cloud native world we have to consider the whole application which includes the data, be it inside or outside of the cluster. Equally depending on the importance of this data (probably important if you pay for the privilege of having it managed) it’s going to need some care and attention when it comes to data management, protection against accidents, misconfigurations and the ever popular world of cyber threats. Overview In thisRead More →

When provisioning Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers with Terraform, managing disk space can be tricky, especially when VMs are deployed with additional root disk space. By default, the root partition often matches the size of the template disk, leaving any extra space unallocated. This post documents resolving this issue to ensure your servers fully utilise their allocated disk space. I would also welcome if there is a way to achieve this through Terraform for ease. The Problem We recently deployed three RHEL 9.3 virtual machines (VMs) in a VMware vSphere environment using Terraform. Each VM was provisioned with a 350GB disk, yet the rootRead More →