vZilla

Hey, it’s been a while…. This is me writing though not another AI dumped bit of content, equally this is for me more than anyone else, its a line in the sand, a commitment of starting a new learning journey and putting it out there for everyone to see. (I did however use AI on the images) For those that know me, I have been a constant and consistent learner. I started my IT career with hardware—building servers for Cambridge University, getting server operating systems up and running, and handling systems administration and operations. That was before the virtualization era. From there, I moved toRead More →

Virtual Machines on Kubernetes is a thing so I thought it would be a good idea to run through how to get the Veeam Software Appliance up and running on KubeVirt which will also translate to enterprise variants that use KubeVirt to enable virtualization on top of Kubernetes such as Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and SUSE Harvester. I wrote about the Veeam Software Appliance and ran through the steps to get the system up and running as the brains of your backup environment along with some of the benefits it brings. For those familiar with the process I took in the above link in vSphere,Read More →

A few times a year, my home lab gets bounced for whatever reason and generally because I have the vSphere vCenter living on top of the 5 ESXi nodes this causes an issue where when the hosts come back up we are lacking a fully functional vCenter, probably need to consider a better approach but here we are. I am able to get into the vCenter Server Management console at https://192.168.169.181:5480 a port etched into my brain for some reason! But when we head to services we have many that are not running and they should be. I check the access settings and ensure thatRead More →

Many MSPs (Managed service providers) have hedged their platform offering in and around the vSphere ecosystem and now what? I have said before about the cost conundrum here and these are some decisions that people in all worlds will have to consider. But in a service provider world it’s maybe not a simple rip and replace with Nutanix AHV or another. Service providers bring values by having this stack that they not only bring a relationship with their customers they also can automate and provide additional wrap around services and join up this vast ecosystem we have when it comes to VMware. It’s also veryRead 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 →

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 →