vZilla

It has been many years of tinkering around with Terraform and Ansible and other configuration management tools when it comes to deploying Veeam software. We can go back 3 years, more since we first started dabbling in the world of using Infrastructure as code to help with the deployment of Veeam. The above code was using Terraform to deploy the virtual machines and then PowerShell to perform an unattended installation, it worked but there was a better way. We also dabbled in the world of configuration management to get that installation done with Chef. We go back to 2018 when this Chef Cookbook started lifeRead More →

My friend vMiss33 kicked off my day as I opened Twitter this morning and her tweet was there, waiting for a morning of thought and posting. I did what any grown up would do in this situation, I clearly thought about what would this look like….. When I was at school, a very British school we had houses and actually only the other week I was trying to remember those houses from over 20 years ago and then realised that as I moved up in school years and different schools we had different houses… Shakespeare was the blue house I was in…. anyway not theRead More →

I have been a huge fan of minikube for a number of years now, it has given me a local lightweight Kubernetes cluster to play around with and demonstrate Kasten K10 and Kanister amongst other learning possibilities without the need for remote and costly cloud clusters. But things have broken for me, one of the main advantages of minikube was the addons available when you deploy your cluster. My simple command to deploy a quick cluster using docker (You can use other options here but for ease docker is super simple) minikube start –addons volumesnapshots,csi-hostpath-driver –apiserver-port=6443 –container-runtime=containerd -p mc-demo –kubernetes-version=1.27.7 To break this command downRead More →

It is Friday morning and we had a power outage during the night in the homelab, everything hardware wise is back up but not my VMware virtual center. Of course that would be the one thing to not come up! This is hosted on one of my two ESXi hosts. When I got to the console after logging into the ESXi host directly we see the “Failed” error message. It was pretty clear that because of the power outage something was not quiesced correctly, makes sense. I first went and got into the shell by providing my root password twice to access another prompt andRead More →

I am getting back into the home lab race, what seems like many years ago I once had a half height rack and some servers for my home lab, the pandemic hit and I decided I was all in on cloud, we hav a good commercial, enterprise lab in Columbus, OH I don’t need this power hungry, noisy situation any longer. The original vzilla homelab My need for a Home Lab? Many of you may be wondering, “Sounds like you have more than enough options to run some workloads for testing and learning” and you would be right I do have access to public cloudRead More →

Having recently read Thomas’s blog on his “Ultimate Home Office Setup” – https://thomasthornton.cloud/2023/08/01/my-ultimate-home-office-setup-a-journey-of-productivity/ I wanted to do something similar documenting my new set up, which has been evolving over the past few years through different houses and setups and equipment, but I think we have finally made it to where we need to be. I for one, during the pandemic was glued almost addicted to YouTube and in particular Office Setups, as a worker based at home or on the road it is important that I have a space to be creative and be able to get productive. I created a similar blog post backRead More →

When using Kubernetes as a platform, there are several data considerations and concerns to keep in mind: Data management is an important consideration when using Kubernetes as a platform, and it is important to have a clear understanding of the data considerations and concerns that apply to your organization. By taking these considerations into account, you can ensure that your data is secure, managed effectively, and in compliance with industry regulations. More on Backup & Recovery Data Backup and Recovery is an essential aspect of data management, especially when using Kubernetes. In Kubernetes, containers and persistent volumes can be recreated in the event of aRead More →

Kubernetes has become one of the most popular open-source platforms for managing containers, allowing organisations to deploy, scale, and manage their applications with ease. In this post, we will explore the concept of Kubernetes as a platform and make comparisons to virtualisation and virtual machines (VMs). Virtualisation has been a game-changer for IT, allowing organisations to run multiple operating systems and applications on a single physical machine, leading to improved utilisation and cost savings. Virtualisation provides a virtualised layer between the physical hardware and the operating system, enabling multiple VMs to run on a single physical host. Kubernetes operates on a similar principle but withRead More →

This has been a long time coming, I have been in the cloud-native world for around 2 years since having more of a focus on cloud-native technologies and Kasten by Veeam which was acquired by Veeam in October 2020. At that time my first KubeCon was virtual for everyone, this was in early 2021 when we had virtual booths, sessions and activities. Then things finally got back to in-person and this was out in LA later in 2021 when there were still restrictions on some countries entering the US so I could not make this one either. Fast forward to May 2022 when KubeCon EURead More →