Category Archives: Home Lab

Updating the Home Lab

I recently got a few new SuperMicro servers for the home lab along with a 10 GbE Cisco switch and an updated Synology NAS. Look for some posts in the coming weeks on my planning and deployment of the new lab. I’ll also have some videos on the process posted to my YouTube channel.

Home Lab Overview

Since I work with different customers all the time, I am constantly testing things for work in my home lab. When customers and co-workers hear about my lab they often ask what hardware is in the lab. I’m putting this post together so I can point people here and say “this is it.” The current… Read More »

New Fedora 21 and ESXi Host in the homelab

A while back I wrote about setting up an old Toshiba laptop we had laying around as a workstation to manage my VMware environment including vCO (now named vRO). That laptop has been working well but I wanted something a bit more powerful to use as a permanent Linux workstation as well as possibly dual… Read More »

Repair a vCenter SQL Express Database

The day before yesterday the power flickered at our house and because I had procrastinated installing a UPS in my home lab, my systems all powered off unexpectedly. Yesterday I went out and bought the UPS and powered everything back on but my vCenter instance was throwing SQL errors all over the place in the… Read More »

VSAN in the home lab

Today I received the 3 mSATA drives I bought from eBay with some NCAA tournament winnings. I got the cheapest mSATA drives I could find which ended up being 32 GB Samsung disks for $25 each with free shipping. I think they were produced for either a Thinkpad or HP laptop but it does not… Read More »

MacBook Pro 8,3 Linux Success… Kinda

In my previous post about my frustration getting Linux installed on my 8,3 MacBook Pro I mentioned that I could not get an installer to boot. Well, with Open SuSE 12.1 I was able to finally get the installer to load and got Linux installed! Most things are working and the system is usable under… Read More »