Homelab Archives - Page 3 of 4

Enable Memory Tiering over NVMe in ESXi 8.0 U3

On November 7, 2024

3 Minutes Read

As I have access to a new, fresh lab server with a spare NVMe SSD, I’ve installed ESXi 8.0 U3 on this server (see my previous blog post) to make use of a new feature called “Memory tiering over NVMe”.

“Memory tiering over NVMe” is a feature in Technical Preview that allows users to add memory capacity to a host by using NVMe devices that are installed locally in the host.

The feature utilizes the NVMe devices as tiered memory and reduces the impact to performance by intelligently choosing which VM memory locations should be stored in the slower NVMe device vs faster DRAM in the host.

In this post, I’ll briefly explain how to setup this feature.

Configure OSPF in NSX-T

By Adrian

On August 2, 2022

In VMware

7 Minutes Read

In my past blog article on setting up NSX-T, I’ve covered using BGP as the dynamic routing protocol for north-south traffic.
A customer wanted to use OSPF to interconnect their physical networking fabric with NSX-T. Time to play with this setup in the lab 🙂

The logical routing topology which is used in my setup is depicted below:

Shutdown of vSphere with Tanzu, vRealize Suite, VCD

By Adrian

On May 20, 2022

In VMware

2 Minutes Read

We have to shutdown the management components of the VMware homelab in a specific order to keep components operational by maintaining the necessary infrastructure, networking, and management services prior before shutdown.

The order is as follows:

VMware homelab vRealize Suite setup

By Adrian

On March 27, 2022

In VMware

15 Minutes Read

VMware vRealize Suite is a purpose-built management solution for the heterogeneous data center and the hybrid cloud. It delivers and manages infrastructure and applications to increase the business agility while maintaining IT control. It provides the most comprehensive management stack for private and public clouds, multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure.

It consists of the following solutions:

vRealize Automation (and vRealize Orchestrator)
vRealize Operations
vRealize Log Insight

To automate installation, configuration, upgrade, patch, configuration management, drift remediation and health from within a single pane of glass, we will use vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.

The below diagram shows technological capabilities and organizational constructs.

In the lab environment we’ll install all solutions as single node instances with the following sizings:

Name	Purpose	Size	vCPU	Memory (GB)	Disk (GB)
vrslcm1	Lifecycle Manager	–	2	6	78
wsa1a	vIDM	Medium	8	16	60
vra1a	vRealize Automation	Medium	12	42	236
vrops1a	vRealize Operations	Extra small	2	8	274
vrli1a	vRealize Log Insight	Small	4	8	530

After the deployment of these solutions, we’re going to initially integrate them.

VMware homelab VCD setup

By Adrian

On March 6, 2022

In VMware

10 Minutes Read

With VMware VMware Cloud Director you can build secure, multi-tenant clouds by pooling virtual infrastructure resources into virtual data centers and exposing them to users through Web-based portals and programmatic interfaces as a fully automated, catalog-based service.

In the lab environment, we’ll setup a simple single cell installation, and add our workload vCenter Server vc2.lab.local and the NSX-T Manager nsx1.lab.local as infrastructure resources.

From these infrastructures we’ll create cloud resources such as a provider VDC, a Geneve network pool, and an External network.

Then we’ll create a tenant organization and assign resources from the provider VDC as an organization VDC to this particular organization. We’ll also create an Edge Gateway to allow the tenant to access the outside world from within his Cloud.

Clouds, Automation & Everything in Between

Tag: Homelab Page 3 of 4

Enable Memory Tiering over NVMe in ESXi 8.0 U3

Configure OSPF in NSX-T

Shutdown of vSphere with Tanzu, vRealize Suite, VCD

VMware homelab vRealize Suite setup

VMware homelab VCD setup