homelab  


Quick Salt State to Deploy Netdata

As a follow-up to my recent explorations with using Tailscale Serve to make netdata monitoring readily available on my tailnet, I wanted a quick way to reproduce that configuration across my handful of systems. These systems already have Tailscale installed and configured, and they're all managed with Salt. So here's a hasty Salt state that I used to make it happen. It simply installs netdata using the handy-dandy kickstart script, and then configures Tailscale to Serve the netdata instance (with a trusted cert!

Tailscale Feature Highlight: SSH, Serve, and Funnel

I've spent the past two years in love with Tailscale, which builds on the secure and high-performance Wireguard VPN protocol and makes it really easy to configure and manage. Being able to easily (and securely) access remote devices as if they were on the same LAN is pretty awesome to begin with, but Tailscale is packed with an ever-expanding set of features that can really help to streamline your operations too.

I Ditched vSphere for Proxmox VE

Way back in 2021, I documented how I had built a VMWare-focused home lab on an Intel NUC 9 host. The setup was fairly complicated specifically so I could build and test content for what was then known as vRealize Automation. My priorities have since shifted1, though, and I no longer have need for vRA at my house. vSphere + vCenter carries a hefty amount of overhead, so I thought it might be time to switch my homelab over to something a bit simpler in the form of Proxmox VE.

Create Virtual Machines on a Chromebook with HashiCorp Vagrant

I've lately been trying to do more with Salt at work, but I'm still very much a novice with that tool. I thought it would be great to have a nice little portable lab environment where I could deploy a few lightweight VMs and practice managing them with Salt - without impacting any systems that are actually being used for anything. Along the way, I figured I'd leverage HashiCorp Vagrant to create and manage the VMs, which would provide a declarative way to define what the VMs should look like.

Upgrading a Standalone vSphere Host With esxcli

You may have heard that there's a new vSphere release out in the wild - vSphere 8, which just reached Initial Availability this week. Upgrading the vCenter in my single-host homelab is a very straightforward task, and using the included Lifecycle Manager would make quick work of patching a cluster of hosts... but things get a little trickier with a single host. I could write the installer ISO to a USB drive, boot the host off of that, and go through the install interactively, but what if physical access to the host is kind of inconvenient?

Removing and Recreating vCLS VMs

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 distributed control plane to offload some of the management responsibilities from the vCenter server. That's very cool, particularly in large continent-spanning environments or those which reach into multiple clouds, but it may not make sense to add those additional workloads in resource-constrained homelabs1.

ESXi ARM Edition on the Quartz64 SBC

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 drive to the USB hub, next to the existing ESXi drive. Booted the installer and selected to upgrade ESXi on the existing device.

VMware Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes Platform in a Homelab

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 meaning to brush up on my Kubernetes skills so I thought deploying and using TCE in my self-contained homelab would be a fun and rewarding learning exercise - and it was!

Secure Networking Made Simple with Tailscale

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) process. And while I thought I was pretty clever for using a WireGuard peer in GCP to maintain a secure tunnel into my home network without having to punch holes through my firewall, routing all my traffic through The Cloud wasn't really optimal1.

Cloud-hosted WireGuard VPN for remote homelab access

For a while now, I've been using an OpenVPN Access Server virtual appliance for remotely accessing my homelab. That's worked fine but it comes with a lot of overhead. It also requires maintaining an SSL certificate and forwarding three ports through my home router, in addition to managing a fairly complex software package and configurations. The free version of the OpenVPN server also only supports a maximum of two simultaneous connections.

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 jbowdre