VMware Octopus wallpaper
Duncan over at Yellow Bricks was nice enough to share this VMware Octopus wallpaper. Of the VMware wallpaper I have this one is my favorite for some reason.
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VMware vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1b released
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My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade
Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.
For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.
At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.
I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.
So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!
Easy ESXi 5.5 upgrade via command line
ESXi 5.5 was just released general availability (GA) on Sunday (9/22) and I’m itching to upgrade the home lab to run the latest version with all it’s goodies. I wanted to try upgrading my hosts without having to go through the same process that I followed setting up ESXi on the NUC in the first place, injecting custom NIC drivers, etc.
Enter the command line…
- Move all VM’s from the host and then put the host into Maintenance Mode.
- Go to the Configuration tab > Security Profile and Enable SSH under Services.
- Under Firewall, enable httpClient (outbound http).
- Open PuTTY (or other SSH client) and SSH into your host.
