By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Kubernetes, Veeam
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Veeam
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Kubernetes, Veeam

*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 →

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized

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 →

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
With: 1 Comment

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 →

image 26

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
With: 0 Comments

I have had a few posts this year regarding the revival of the home lab. But we have progressed into this rabbit hole even further during the year of 2024. State of the union As we approach the end of 2024 and I am under strict instructions not to spend any more money, the current state of play is: In this post I am probably not going to be able to get into the software layer above and beyond the hypervisor or Kubernetes layer. But I will state that the reason for the home lab is to learn and get hands on with the technologyRead More →

image 16

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
With: 1 Comment

Forgive me for I have not upgraded my home lab bare metal cluster for a while… in fact ever since the first deployment. We have been sitting on Kubernetes 1.27.7 for a while now. In fact my HomeLab tinkering has been non existent for the last few months due to events season, but here we are. I was able to upgrade my virtual Talos Cluster which is running on my VMware vSphere environment. Please let me know if you would like an update on this lab situation, we have a lot going on. The goal of this post is to get my bare metal clusterRead More →

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
With: 0 Comments

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 →

By:
On:
In: Uncategorized
With: 0 Comments

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 →