Back to the Mothership!

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My last blog post was from February 2024. That was over a year ago (at the time of this blog post, which you are currently reading). Far too long! And now I’m writing a new blog post titled “Back to the Mothership.” What does that mean?

I’m glad you asked.

What happened?

Towards the end of March, I lost my job. I was laid off. It was quite a surprise and also a bitter disappointment. Especially when there had been no prior warnings or any discussions with the boss or anything like that. And especially when the Outlook invitation was “Personnel / Goal Setting” (that sounds promising, right?). And when someone from HR is also in the meeting room, you can put two and two together.

But that’s in the past now. I’m over it. Done and forgotten (but not forgiven). I will miss the team I was privileged to lead there. Including me, half the team has resigned or was resigned within three weeks.

Wow, bummer, what now?

I have spent a lot of time with my family in the last two months since I was laid off, spending a lot of time with my son and my wife. And I’ve also been able to get a lot of things in and around the house in order. So I cleaned all the windows (finally, once again after a few years), repaired the robotic lawnmower and gave it a new garage, and did a lot of those little things that take time and that I’ve been putting off until now.

But I also took time to figure out what I really wanted professionally. I enjoyed some good discussions with my wife (she is an emergency doctor, so she knows urgent and special situations), and also with good friends about my situation. What are my strengths? What skills do I have? What is my expertise? Is computer science (well, I mean the big IT), especially the field of virtualization and technology, still my passion? And the answer to this last question is clearly “YES”.

And what’s that with the Mothership now?

Now I can let the cat out of the bag, since the contracts are signed. I’ll be starting a new position as a Senior System Engineer in the VCF stream at the company “soulTec” on June 2nd. I will work a lot with everything related to vSphere, datacenter, a lot of customer projects, both onsite and remote, and I will learn a lot! I’m so excited and anxious, I can’t wait to show up at the office for the first time on Monday.

Technology with passion!

An ode to joy – or why you don’t have to mourn the free ESXi

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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 that VMware by Broadcom has canceled the free ESXi hypervisor. And yes, that may not be the fine English way to mash such a product. I don’t even know if there is a “good” way to do something like that.

Yes. It’s bad that the “free ESXi” has been canceled. At least according to what I read about on X (Twitter) and some IT news portals. People were (and still are) angry about this move of thinning out the product portfolio. I never used this free version, and I wasn’t even aware that this was such a big thing. But that doesn’t count here.

Yes. There are alternative hypervisors, like Hyper-V, Proxmox, and others, and they are free. You can run virtual machines even on storage systems like TrueNAS or Unraid (the last one does cost some bucks). And a free hypervisor, I don’t care about the flavor, might be just enough for some people. They may run a homelab with some VMs, maybe some production services for their home network like Pi-Hole, to name one.

But this is it.

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Happy New Year 2024

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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 listing these things here. Maybe these (and some other things) were more important than blogging. Well, I would even bet that they were for sure more important than blogging. I’m usually sharing only tech things here, mainly focusing on virtualization, and some times cloud, but rarely personal things and thoughts. So, that’s then a “personal first” too I think.

But anyway. Back to topic.

I hope that your wishes come true and that you find the courage to take new steps. For 2024, I wish you and your loved ones all the best. And I hope to see you soon!

Happy New Year!

My Top 10 Posts in 2023

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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 new host to a vSAN cluster

During late summer this year I did some vSAN experiments in my homelab. Three blog posts about vSAN made it into the top 10 of 2023. The linked blog post shows you how to add a new (an additional) ESXi host to your vSAN cluster.

https://www.driftar.ch/2023/08/15/how-to-add-a-new-host-to-a-vsan-cluster/

9. VMware – Clone a VM with snapshots (and consolidate it)

Some “vmkfstools” adventure to recover a VM that had a snapshot that wasn’t cleanly deleted.

https://www.driftar.ch/2018/09/03/vmware-clone-a-vm-with-snapshots-and-consolidate-it/

8. Backup and Restore vCenter Server Appliance

This blog post covers the backup and recovery of the vCenter server appliance. An easy-to-follow guide.

https://www.driftar.ch/2020/04/21/backup-and-restore-vcenter-server-appliance/

7. My homelab hardware gets its own rack

Well, at least the Tweet I published for this blog post has (as per December 2023) more than 24’000 impressions. It looks like people like hardware, and also DIY stuff.

https://www.driftar.ch/2020/09/26/my-homelab-hardware-gets-its-own-rack/

6. Changing FRU information on Supermicro servers

Probably worth a rewrite or at least an update. But back in the days I had an issue with one of my Supermicro servers. The information stored in the BIOS were not correct. This blog post shows you how to fix this by flashing the correct information into the BIOS.

https://www.driftar.ch/2021/10/08/changing-fru-information-on-supermicro-servers/

5. “Starting drivers, please wait” – An HPE adventure story

This was one strange issue! Back in the day when I was working at a solution provider, a customer reported an issue. His ESXi hosts have lost connectivity to a storage system. It took some time to solve, and it was a good experience.

https://www.driftar.ch/2017/07/18/starting-drivers-please-wait-an-hpe-adventure-story/

4. How to reset the ESXi root password?

It is sometimes necessary to reset the ESXi root password. The “officially” supported way to reset the ESXi root password is to reinstall the host from scratch. But the magic in this blog post is called “host profiles”.

https://www.driftar.ch/2022/08/17/how-to-reset-the-esxi-root-password/

3. How to shut down a vSAN cluster – and start it again

One of three blog posts related to vSAN made it to the third place of 2023. How to shut down the vSAN cluster and start it again, properly.

https://www.driftar.ch/2023/08/10/how-to-shut-down-a-vsan-cluster-and-start-it-again/

2. An easy way to quickly migrate a VMware VM to Synology VMM

On the second place of 2023, there is this post on how to quickly migrate a VMware VM to the Synology Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).

https://www.driftar.ch/2020/09/01/an-easy-way-to-quickly-migrate-a-vmware-vm-to-synology-vmm/

1. How to remove a host from a vSAN cluster

And the first place winner for my Top 10 blog posts in 2023 another vSAN blog post! It shows you how to remove a host from a vSAN cluster.

https://www.driftar.ch/2023/08/15/how-to-remove-a-host-from-a-vsan-cluster/

Storage performance upgrade – and how to make use of Vmknic binding

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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 the Synology DS1621xs+. Synology launched it in September 2020, and I ordered it about two months later.

Some of the technical specifications of the NAS:

  • It has 2 x M.2 2280 NVMe slots
  • It comes with 8 GB DDR4 ECC SODIMM (expandable up to 32 GB, and yes I upgraded to 32 GB)
  • It is equipped with an Intel Xeon D-1527 4-core 2.2 GHz CPU that has a Turbo Boost up to 2.7 GHz
  • In terms of connectivity, there are two 1 GbE and one 10 GbE RJ-45 ports
  • If you fancy, you could install some PICe card (the NAS has one 8-lane x8 slot), but I don’t know why or what
  • And you can install up to six 3.5″ or 2.5″ drives

So that’s the basics covered. Let’s get back to the topic.

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