IT Homelab

[Fishy]

Anyone running one ?  Had two pcs running esxi with 32 gb memory and another pc running xpenology as the shared storage... also had a pc with  Windows 2019 server running veeam as the backup for all the vms..... now cut down to one host running vms with local ssd storage in an attempt to reduce electricity costs.. running a Cisco vWlc  with 7 Cisco access points about the house/garage to supply Wi-Fi to every corner of the house/garden.. all connected with HP switches with various vlans... works pretty well I have to say...

[Fishy]

Also a couple of raspberry Pis  as a music server and Osmc video server...

[Slim]

I look after a lot of shared storage / hypervisor cluster systems at work, many of them installed at customer sites by myself but my stuff at home is a lot more simple. No shared storage or clustering. I have a couple of VMs running under KVM on a Linux host and two independent desktop PCs. Nothing fancy.

[Fishy]

Been doing a bit of  upgrading the last couple of weeks.. my two ESXi hosts now running ESXi v8 and vcenter also running v8..  got a problem with vmotion which is slow and just floods rest of the vms... dropped packets.. can't seem to get to the bottom of it all.. may roll back to vSphere 7 which worked with no problems..
Also upgraded veeam backup and replication to version 12...

[Fishy]

Back to VSphere 7 and everything working as it should can vmotion a windows box in 30-40 secs compared to the 3-4 mins it was taking in VSphere 8...

[Fishy]

Grabbed an Hp Elitedesk 800 g2  from eBay...can take up to 64gb memory.. as an upgrade to my existing hp elite 8300 ( only 32gb mem) so installed esxi8 onto an ssd no problem .. more compute power and works great in the homelab.....will need to grab another and buy in some more memory...... don't tell the mrs....

[Fishy]

Another g2 grabbed from eBay and more memory.. it's all coming together nicely😀

[Fishy]

And then falling apart.. PSoD on my Esxi host..memory allocation I think.. anyway reduced the memory down and appears ok for now..  running on local storage ...need to reconfigure the xpenology shared drive storage a bit then get the additional host up n running

[Fishy]

Nice n easy upgrade on my pfsense firewall vm from 2.6 to 2.7.....

[Fishy]

Beep errors on some new memory so back it goes...

[Fishy]

New 16gb replacement now in place and working fine..still need another couple of 16s to get the host up to the same spec as the working one then will bring it into a new cluster ..

Also setup OpManager on a windows 2022 box to replace my aging solarwinds network monitoring.. easy to setup and looks good and has a nice app as well

[Fishy]

Did a veeam patch before heading on hols to get it  to latest version so it's now fully compatible with Esxi 8

Will get the last two memory modules when I get home. And may grab another hp elite desk off eBay to replace my shared storage PC as they are very very quiet devices

[Fishy]

Memory modules now in place so got two Esxi hosts running with 64gb mem..

Grabbed another elitedesk 800g2 to upgrade my shared storage box..

Also grabbed an Aruba instant AP which I've heard good things about.. if you have a few around the house they can create their own mesh network.... Could be time to ditch my ciscos APs...

[Fishy]

The Aruba instant AP arrived today.. a breeze to setup and the speeds with a device attached to it are very impressive .. will grab another couple and see how the mesh network hangs together and behaves.. looking very promising..

Also spun up a TrueNas box as an alternative shared storage box.. again looks good

[Fishy]

Woke up to Alexa not working properly wifi goosed...... turns out a disk had died on one of my hosts.. it was really my dhcp box which was on that disk amongst other devices which was causing the problem..

Thank goodness for backups.. veeam instant recovery got the vm up n running and wifi back to normal... then migrated it over to one of my hosts...
The dead disk.. hit very hard with a hammer.. very satisfying..