Due to planned maintenance, I needed to temporary move the blog to my home network to prevent downtime. Hosting a public facing website without precautions, can cause threat actors to laterally move through the network. To lower the risk, the web server running the blog needed to run in a Read more…
Once in a while new hardware is released that makes a difference. Such a device is the Intel Optane series of high-performance SSD’s for professional use, which was released in late 2017. In this case I’m talking about the Intel Optane P4800X and P5800X and their consumer counterparts (900P and Read more…
You may recognize this. You’ve updated your ESXi hosts via vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) or similar method, the host rebooted during remediation and… that’s it. Your host is not reachable anymore. That happened to my lab server last week, while updating it to the latest ESXi 8.0 patch release. So Read more…
NSX 4.0 onwards only supports vSphere 7 and later. In my homelab I’m still running ESXi 6.7 which is joined to a vCenter 8 instance. It’s because the RAID controller in my host is unsupported in ESXi 7+ and no native drivers are available. Running an older ESXi version is Read more…
In most cases VMware Tools are available as part of the ESXi installation. When updating or upgrading vSphere on an ESXi host, the VMware Tools could be updated, but most of the time not to the latest version. In this post I’ll show you how ESXi hosts can updated to Read more…
How to manual update you ESXi host with the latest VMware patches.
My latest homelab addition is the Maxtang NX6412 NUC which was given by VMware, together with Cohesity (many thanks!) at VMware Explore EU (in the US co-sponsored by NetApp) to all vExperts who registered for the gift. After adding RAM and a SATA SSD, it was time it ran vSphere Read more…
Once and a while ESXi needs to be installed on a device of which the drivers (NIC / Storage) are not built into the ISO installer (yet). In my case it’s needed for the vExpert homelab Maxtang NUC device. This device has a Realtek PCIe NIC’s not supported by ESXi Read more…
Although vSphere 8 is released (GA) at VMware Explore Europe 2022 and modified exams can be expected, the vSphere 7 ones are still current. Also at Explore I took the Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x exam and passed it to update my VCDX-DCV certification based on vSphere 6.5 to the Read more…
Since PowerCLI 13 is released last week (November the 22nd, 2022), I started the update process on my Windows and MacOS device. I needed the latest version to be able to create a customized ESXi 8 ISO installer for the vExpert Maxtang NUC that has the Realtek USB NIC drivers Read more…