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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 →

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 →

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 →