Welcome to my 2025 Home Lab: Where Ideas Are Built, Broken, and Rebuilt Better. A constantly evolving playground where I simulate customer environments, test disaster recovery strategies, and push platforms until something breaks (and then fix it… usually). I've always enjoyed reading these posts, but have never put …
Read MoreI recently deployed a new Nexus 93180YC-EX switch into my home lab, to replace the aging 9372PX. Sure, for a home lab this was fine, but I wanted to get up to some 25Gbe speeds! I've got various equipment connected to that old Nexus, with 2 Nutanix clusters and single VMware cluster, plus various other things, nothing …
Read MoreIt’s been a while since I’ve gotten any fresh content on this blog, hopefully I’ll get some content ideas to keep a regular cadence of updates going. While I was updating the cabling on the garage lab, I realized it had been a while since I had done anything on my CE lab from a version perspective, in fact the last …
Read MoreI love the fact that Nutanix provides a Community Edition for those of us with home labs, I can bring the Enterprise Cloud I so enjoy deploying for customers close to home. Sure, would I love to have a small NX-1365 in the rack at home, who wouldn’t? Maybe someday… But in the meantime, Community Edition provides me …
Read MoreInstalling Nutanix CE 5.6 with ISO Installer
Nutanix CE Version 5.6 is out, and it’s hot!!! With the release of Nutanix Community Edition version 5.6, Nutanix has also provided a new installation mechanism as an alternative to the previous dd imaging method, now allowing for a .iso installer. Previous CE Installs With previous Nutanix CE installs, it required the …
Read MoreIt’s been over 6 months since I last had NSX working in my home lab, and with a rebuild I decided it was time to wrap up Part 2 of my NSX in a home lab blog post. In Part 1 of my Deploying NSX series, we covered the prep of NSX in the environment, including deploying the NSX Manager appliance, deploying NSX Controllers …
Read MoreOnto the Logical Router…. In Part 1 of my Deploying NSX series, we covered the prep of NSX in the environment, including deploying the NSX Manager appliance, deploying NSX Controllers and vSphere host preparation. In Part 2 this part of the series, we covered the creation of Logical Switches and our NSX Edge, which …
Read MoreI’m a fan of NSX. Ever since I deployed it for the first time, and got it working, I realize the power, AND ease of what it would provide. I’ve had VMware NSX deployed in my lab for a while now, but I wanted to migrate my vSphere environment over to utilizing NSX fully for all VM’s, minus vCenter, the PSC, etc. At the …
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