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…
After attending VMware EMPOWER earlier this year, I won a voucher for a free exam (thanks EMPOWER team!). I chose the NSX-T 3.1 Data Center Security exam because of personal interest and exciting security features NSX offers. While preparing for the exam I gathered a list of study materials I Read more…
This week I had several conversations colleagues and suppliers regarding the quiescing options of vSphere based VMs for backup and replication purposes. During these talks I noticed that is it more complex then most would think (including myself). This gave me the idea to write a blog post about the Read more…
While designing a vSAN based platform for a customer lately, I was looking into NVMe based ReadyNodes which needed to run ESXi 6.7 U3. While looking for a specific Dell rackmount config in the VMware Compatibility Guide, something caught my interest. Those were the lines at the bottom of the Read more…
In January I attended the NSX-T 2.4 Install, Configure and Manager (ICM) course. The course itself was great and gave me thorough knowledge of the product. By attending the course, all pieces of the puzzle fell together and I was impressed with the product so far. Although NSX-T was not Read more…
The SSD tier in my lab became quite full in the beginning of this year, so the search began for some expansion. All 8 hot-swap slots in my single node lab server are occupied so, it needed to be an NVMe drive due to slot availability but mainly because of Read more…
Since a while now, customers show an increasingly interest in data-at-rest encryption. vSphere has build-in encryption features since the 6.5 version. I wrote this post to show how Equinix SmartKey can help implementing these encryption features without buying HSM appliances yourself. Since I started working with the SmartKey product, I Read more…