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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 →

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 →