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Homelab

Deploy vCenter Server Appliance with Terraform

I’m a big fan of William Lam’s scripts to deploy nested vSphere lab environments. A few months ago, he published a script for vSphere 7.0 that deploys the usual suspects. It also deploys vSphere with Kubernetes. I’ve always wanted to see if I could build something similar using Terraform. I think it would be awesome to run a terraform apply and go from an OVA file to a fully deployed vCenter. I’ve messed around with this in the past. I even fixed a bug that made the VCSA as well as William’s Nested ESXi Appliances undeployable. Without any hacks you could deploy a VCSA and get it online enough for network connectivity. Due to limitations, you would have to manually configure the VCSA from the VAMI interface. As another option, you could manually edit the VCSA OVF file and change… Read More »Deploy vCenter Server Appliance with Terraform

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 as home lab storage

I recently outgrew the local storage on my gaming PC. Rather than just get some bigger drives, I decided that I wanted a separate box for just storage and Plex so that it was easier to tinker on my gaming PC without impact to my family. I thought about buying a Synology or QNAP device, but the cost seemed relatively high for what you get. If I build my own device I have a bit more flexibility on hardware selection, operating system, and disk layout. I ended up getting an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10. This system seems to get a lot of hate because it is lacking in features compared to the Gen8. Specifically, the fact that it doesn’t have an iLO and it has a soldered on processor. The new Gen10 Plus reinstates these features with added cost. I… Read More »HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 as home lab storage