VMware vCenter does wonders for abstracting away the layers of complexity involved in managing a large virtual infrastructure, but when something goes wrong it can be challenging to find exactly where the problem lies. And it can be even harder to proactively address potential issues before they occur. Fortunately …

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Way back in 2020, VMware released vSphere 7 Update 1 and introduced the new vSphere Clustering Services (vCLS) to improve how cluster services like the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) operate. vCLS deploys lightweight agent VMs directly on the cluster being managed, and those VMs provide a decoupled and …

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I recently started using Obsidian for keeping notes, tracking projects, and just generally organizing all the information that would otherwise pass into my brain and then fall out the other side. Unlike other similar solutions which operate entirely in The Cloud, Obsidian works with Markdown files stored in a local …

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I've been doing a bit of work lately to make my vRealize Automation setup more flexible and dynamic and less dependent upon hardcoded values. To that end, I thought it was probably about time to learn how to interact with the vRA REST API. I wrote this post to share what I've learned and give a quick crash course on …

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ESXi-ARM Fling v1.10 Update On July 20, 2022, VMware released a major update for the ESXi-ARM Fling. Among other fixes and improvements, this version enables in-place ESXi upgrades and adds support for the Quartz64's on-board NIC. To update, I: Wrote the new ISO installer to another USB drive. Attached the installer …

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Not long ago, I deployed a Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes cluster in my homelab, and then I fumbled through figuring out how to log into it from a different device than the one I'd used for deploying the cluster from the tanzu cli. That setup works great for playing with Kubernetes in my homelab but I'd love to do …

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Now that VMware has released vCenter 7.0U3c to resolve the Log4Shell vulnerabilities I thought it might be fun to run a security scan against the upgraded VCSA in my homelab to see how it looks. Of course, I don't actually have a security scanner in that environment so I'll need to deploy one. I start off by heading to …

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I recently wrote about getting started with VMware's Tanzu Community Edition and deploying phpIPAM as my first real-world Kubernetes workload. Well I've spent much of my time since then working on a script which would help to populate my phpIPAM instance with a list of networks to monitor. Planning and Exporting The …

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When I set up my Tanzu Community Edition environment, I did so from a Linux VM since the containerized Linux environment on my Chromebook doesn't support the kind bootstrap cluster used for the deployment. But now that the Kubernetes cluster is up and running, I'd like to be able to connect to it directly without the …

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Lately I've been spending some time getting more familiar with VMware's Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes distribution, but I'm still not quite familiar enough with the tanzu command line. If only there were a better way for me to discover the available commands for a given context and help me type them correctly... …

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I recently needed to export a list of all the Linux VMs in a rather large vSphere environment spanning multiple vCenters (and the entire globe), and I wanted to include information about which virtual datacenter each VM lived in to make it easier to map VMs to their physical location. I've got a Connect-vCenters …

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Back in October, VMware announced Tanzu Community Edition as way to provide "a full-featured, easy-to-manage Kubernetes platform that’s perfect for users and learners alike." TCE bundles a bunch of open-source components together in a modular, "batteries included but swappable" way: I've been …

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Not all that long ago, I shared about a somewhat-complicated WireGuard VPN setup that I had started using to replace my previous OpenVPN solution. I raved about WireGuard's speed, security, and flexible (if complex) Cryptokey Routing, but adding and managing peers with WireGuard is a fairly manual (and tedious) …

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Non-technical users deserve private communications, too. I shared a few months back about the steps I took to deploy my own Matrix homeserver instance, and I've happily been using the Element client for secure end-to-end encrypted chats with a small group of my technically-inclined friends. Being able to have private …

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