Welcome and Goodbye – New Job!

by

The last few weeks, and probably months, it was very quiet on my blog. I hadn’t much time to investigate, test, try, and write things down. I had a more important focus over the past few months. And I usually don’t bring up personal things on my blog. But beginning with the 1st of December 2023, I’ll explore new horizons. No, I’m not going on a world tour, or a long holiday voyage. I’m switching my job.

The past

I worked for nearly six years for a company in the high-tech area, started there as an ICT systems specialist, and made it up to ICT systems engineering through the years, with lots of learning, certification, and dedication. My last employer was a company in the high-tech area, with surface treatments, coatings, filaments, etc. The last few months I’ve spent with different projects, documentation work, teaching our internal service and support people, and also handing over things to my team properly. I’m feeling confident that everything is fine and my former coworkers can get over “the loss”. Now it’s time for me to explore new horizons.

The future

The company which hired me is located in the healthcare branch. During the past few months, this company grew to the largest rehabilitation provider in Switzerland: they operate more than 800 beds and employ around 2,100 people. I’ll be working in the IT team (who would have thought) and will take over the responsibility for their VMware Horizon VDI infrastructure. What a great new challenge!

It’s not easy to quit a job and start something new. Everyone who did that probably knows what I’m talking about. And the fact that my last employer and I had a good relationship didn’t make it any easier.

Thank you

The last nearly six years have been very interesting, instructive, and challenging. I’ve met so many great people with in-depth knowledge and a sense for the business. I have to thank my boss for the many years and the trust he gave me. Also many thanks to my team and coworkers for all the support I received when I needed it. You did a great job folks!

How to create custom (storage) reports on your Synology NAS

by

The vExperts had the chance to attend an exclusive online session recently together with Synology. The topic was “Flexible VM backup and recovery solutions with Synology”. Josue Guzman, Technical Account Manager at Synology, showed us how to set up and use the VM backup solution. He demoed also the whole backup and restore process. And especially the instant restore option, where the Synology NAS mounts itself as an NFS datastore into your ESXi host was awesome.

Many thanks to Corey Romero and the vExpert team for organizing all these cool sessions!

But I’m not going to recap the session here. I just want to pick up the thread because there is a not-inconsiderable amount of space required with backup. And if you also have specific RTO and RPO that have to hold data for a certain period of time, then the storage requirement can be quite large.

And that’s exactly the thread I want to pick up. When you’re working with Synology NAS systems, you may know how cumbersome it sometimes is to get the size of the various (shared) folders you have on your NAS. Sure, you can do “right-click => select Properties” on every folder, note it down somewhere, and then you can add all the values together. But who wants that?

But there is a much nicer and more elegant way to get the folder size. And at the end, you even see colored pie charts. Well, are you curious now?

Read more

How to automatically remove VMs from backup

by

It’s been some time since my last blog post in general, and a lot of time has passed since my last Veeam blog post in particular. I just recently stumbled across something in Veeam Backup & Replication that I wanted to share with you. When you check my latest home lab generation (I did a rebuild and also exchanged some coins for refurbished hardware), you can see that there was something going on.

But why am I talking about Veeam Backup & Replication? Well, because I’m using it in the free “Community Edition” for my homelab. And because I still love Veeam. And when I read social media posts like this one, then I get watery eyes.

What is this Community Edition?

With this free gift from Veeam, you can protect up to 10 workloads. No matter if on VMware or Hyper-V, you can protect Windows and Linux servers, laptops, NAS, and more. You can enjoy (more or less) all the awesome features of the Enterprise edition, like:

  • Effective protection for virtual and physical workloads on-premises
  • Restore VMs quickly and get fast granular file and application-item restores with Veeam Explorers for Microsoft applications
  • Create bootable copies of workloads onsite or in offsite locations for migration and disaster recovery
  • Restore and/or migrate on-premises Windows/Linux VMs, physical servers, and endpoints to AWS, Azure, and Azure Stack
  • Verify that backups are free of malware before restoring them to production
  • Simple and powerful file protection of unstructured data through an easy-to-use wizard-driven approach
  • And many things more!

Sure, some really cool stuff is limited to the Enterprise edition (like various storage integrations, etc.). But still, it’s an awesome piece of software that’s free forever (the Community Edition), and fits perfectly for homelabs.

But enough marketing, you know the good stuff anyway. Let’s get back to the topic.

Read more

I’m building a new old computer

by

Yes, you’ve read that correctly. The title is confusing. I’m building a new old computer. Usually, something is new or old, but it can’t be both. But this time it is indeed both. It’s not directly Schrödinger’s computer, both old and new at the same time. But I think you’ll get the point.

Before we go into this topic: it has nothing to do with virtualization. Well, technically. But first things first.

Many moons ago I stumbled across some Tweets (that was before it was called X) of people gathering old hardware. Pentium III CPUs, old graphics cards like the Voodoo series, or Creative SoundBlaster sound cards. And for sure the very legacy beige computer cases. The good old stuff we all remember. The seed of building such an old computer has been planted a long time ago. And it germinated, grew, and now the young plant is blooming.

I didn’t start directly with gathering hardware and buying shedloads of old stuff. No. I first did some trial & error in my vSphere homelab. Yes. You can install Windows 98 as a virtual machine on your vSphere environment. I’m not saying you should, but it’s possible to do so. Unfortunately, you won’t have sound output, at least as far as I was able to test. So I moved on and set up a virtual machine on VMware Workstation. After installing the right sound driver, there was that iconic Windows startup sound. Oh, how I loved it!

Read more

How to remove a host from a vSAN cluster

by

This blog post, I call blog posts like these “quick & dirty posts”, will show you today how to remove an ESXi host permanently from your vSAN cluster. Yes. Permanently. Forever.

Usually, you’re adding more capacity to a cluster, which means adding more hosts or disks to solve that problem. However, some legitimate reasons exist to remove an ESXi host from a vSAN cluster. Maybe you’re currently in the middle of a hardware renewal. The new hardware is already installed and running in production. And now, server by server, you’re removing the old hardware because you’re on track with the workload migration. The same counts for adding a cluster with nodes that have more “meat by the bone”, more compute power, and storage capacity. Nodes that are running more energy-efficient than the old ones. You see, only two reasons, but there might be many more.

But let’s dive into this topic now.

How to remove an ESXi host from a vSAN cluster?

We’re starting with making sure that the cluster and the disk groups have enough space to have one host removed. If the cluster is fine, let’s move on to remove the host.

Place the host into maintenance mode

Right-click the host, choose “Maintenance Mode”, then “Enter Maintenance Mode”.

Read more