Synology Active Backup For Business – VMware Lab Protection

I have a Synology NAS at home which is used for both my home lab and general NAS purposes (file shares, Plex, etc). I recently setup the ‘Active Backup For Business’ (ABfB) package on my Synology as I wanted to try out the backup function for my VMware lab. Excitingly for me the ABfB package … Read more

VMware VMUG – Hello From My Home Lab Goes International – Episode 5

Well I might as well link this here seeing as it’s on Twitter and various other places! I had the pleasure of doing a web session with Lindy from VMware for the ‘Hello From My Home Lab’ series and it’s been up on YouTube and I think showing at VMworld 2018. I’ve been meaning to … Read more

Home Lab Storage and Network Upgrade

I’m a huge advocate of home lab equipment – it’s one of the best ways to learn and grow as an IT engineer or whatever your job title names you. Having stuff you can intentionally break then try to fix or to test something so you are ten times more confident doing it for real … Read more

Change Supermicro IPMI Admin Password

Changing default passwords is a vital task – it is never a good idea to leave any system credentials as they come ‘out of the box’. With that in mind I’m changing the password on the IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) admin account for my two Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers.   First off I log onto … Read more

Windows Server Core Expand Volume

I am trying to run as many of my Windows server home lab virtual machines (VM) as Core installs. This reduces the resource requirement for each VM in terms of drive space, memory and CPU – obviously a good thing in any environment. It also forces me to learn more ways of dealing with situations, … Read more

Intel X552/X557-AT Network Adapter Driver Installation on VMware ESXi

My home lab is comprised of two Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers which utilise the Intel Xeon-D system on chip (SoC) CPU. This chip has built in 10Gb Ethernet support and provides two ports for cool stuff like storage/vMotion/VSAN etc. We also have two 1Gb NICs, again provided through the SoC. Unfortunately the standard installation of VMware ESXi … Read more

VMware ESXi Embedded Host Client Installation

Today I’m going to install the VMware ESXi Embedded Host Client software on one of my Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T lab servers. This is a VMware fling I’ve kept an eye on since it’s first release and much as I would like to see it on our production systems it isn’t’ something we have signed off on … Read more

Cisco SG300 Default Route

I’ve been working on my home lab and finally have a few virtual machines running which will require Internet access (e.g Windows Server Update Services). My Cisco SG300 switch is setup for layer 3 mode and I have two VLANs currently configured on it with more to come as my lab environment grows. An important … Read more

Configure Cisco SG300 Switch Layer 3 Mode

The Cisco SG300 switch series can act as a standard layer 2 switch or be enabled for layer 3 functionality. Typically the switch will come in layer 2 mode (also called switch mode in the CLI). There are a couple of ways layer 3 functionality can be enabled and I will demonstrate them both below. … Read more