An ode to joy, or why you don’t have to mourn the free ESXi. An obituary. But before I go into depth here, I would like to declare the following: This blog post is reflecting my personal opinion. Based on my knowledge and experience, as well as the things I have read on the internet and heard from people directly and discussed with them, I have written this blog post. The title of this blog post says a lot. At least I think so. And I’m glad you stumbled across this blog post or clicked the link wherever it has been posted. In the last few days, there has been a lot of reading about the fact ..read more

Last year I didn’t write such a Happy New Year blog post. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t had the time, or I just wasn’t in the mood. Or maybe a combination of both (and/or more factors). Over the last two years I have had the joy and honor of celebrating some personal firsts: I earned my first VMware VCP certification I married my girlfriend We built a house (we moved together earlier, but that wasn’t part of the past two years) We became parents We still have cats (ok, not a first, but the cats wanted to be mentioned here too…) And some other things To be honest, I don’t know why im listi ..read more

Another year is coming to an end, it’s 2023 and the beginning of another year. With this blog article, I’d like to present to you my Top 10 posts of 2023. Surprisingly, the Top 10 blog posts are not all from this or last year. Obviously, people are still searching for solutions for problems they have with some “old” stuff, or they are looking for solutions to problems they have in their current infrastructure. I hope that my blog posts will help the people out there in the tech community solve their problems. I’ll do my best to keep on doing my work and sharing my knowledge. 10. How to add a n ..read more

It’s been a while now (exactly two years and one month), since I bought my last Synology NAS, both for homelab and personal/private usage. Why did I buy a new NAS? There are some requirements that my new NAS had to fulfill: Capable of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (integrated or with an addon card) Enough slots for disks (at least five) Two NVMe slots for using NVMe SSDs as read/write cache (integrated or with an addon card) Can be used for homelab storage, as well as backup storage for home computers, laptops, etc. When looking for that one NAS that could handle all of the above, I stumbled across th ..read more

The vExpert applications for 2024 are open now. Nice! But what is this? Some vendors have special programs for the IT folks around the world. These programs are designed for ambassadors and evangelists. Microsoft with its MVP, Veeam with the Vanguards, and many more. As benefits, you may get early access to beta versions, marketing information, they help you promote your blog posts and many other great things. The VMware vExpert program is VMware’s global evangelism and advocacy program. There is no certification exam for becoming a vExpert, no course requirement. It is kind of an award or an ..read more

The last few weeks, and probably months, it was very quiet on my blog. I hadn’t much time to investigate, test, try, and write things down. I had a more important focus over the past few months. And I usually don’t bring up personal things on my blog. But beginning with the 1st of December 2023, I’ll explore new horizons. No, I’m not going on a world tour, or a long holiday voyage. I’m switching my job. The past I worked for nearly six years for a company in the high-tech area, started there as an ICT systems specialist, and made it up to ICT systems engineering through the years, with lots of ..read more

The vExperts had the chance to attend an exclusive online session recently together with Synology. The topic was “Flexible VM backup and recovery solutions with Synology”. Josue Guzman, Technical Account Manager at Synology, showed us how to set up and use the VM backup solution. He demoed also the whole backup and restore process. And especially the instant restore option, where the Synology NAS mounts itself as an NFS datastore into your ESXi host was awesome. Many thanks to Corey Romero and the vExpert team for organizing all these cool sessions! But I’m not going to recap the session here ..read more

It’s been some time since my last blog post in general, and a lot of time has passed since my last Veeam blog post in particular. I just recently stumbled across something in Veeam Backup & Replication that I wanted to share with you. When you check my latest home lab generation (I did a rebuild and also exchanged some coins for refurbished hardware), you can see that there was something going on. But why am I talking about Veeam Backup & Replication? Well, because I’m using it in the free “Community Edition” for my homelab. And because I still love Veeam. And when I read social media ..read more

Yes, you’ve read that correctly. The title is confusing. I’m building a new old computer. Usually, something is new or old, but it can’t be both. But this time it is indeed both. It’s not directly Schrödinger’s computer, both old and new at the same time. But I think you’ll get the point. Before we go into this topic: it has nothing to do with virtualization. Well, technically. But first things first. Many moons ago I stumbled across some Tweets (that was before it was called X) of people gathering old hardware. Pentium III CPUs, old graphics cards like the Voodoo series, or Creative SoundBlas ..read more

This blog post, I call blog posts like these “quick & dirty posts”, will show you today how to remove an ESXi host permanently from your vSAN cluster. Yes. Permanently. Forever. Usually, you’re adding more capacity to a cluster, which means adding more hosts or disks to solve that problem. However, some legitimate reasons exist to remove an ESXi host from a vSAN cluster. Maybe you’re currently in the middle of a hardware renewal. The new hardware is already installed and running in production. And now, server by server, you’re removing the old hardware because you’re on track with the work ..read more