To complete my setup, once I deployed all my virtual machines in the previous articles, I also need a S3 bucket to be later used in Veeam as an object storage. And obviously, I can also automated this part with Terraform.
Tag: lab
Tech
Continue Reading
My Automated Lab project: #5 Deploy a Linux vSphere VM with Terraform and custom disks
After deploying a Windows VM in the previous article, this time I will deploy a Linux VM to be used as a Veeam Hardened Repository. Since I need some more space for storing the backup, I will use this opportunity to create the VM with a additional disks.
Tech
Continue Reading
My Automated Lab project: #4 Deploy the VMs from templates using Terraform
After I have created my templates with Packer in the previous posts, I can now use them every time as a quick source for creating my own virtual machines. Thanks to Terraform, I’ll be able to deploy each new vm in a matter of minutes, and also to customize each of them as I need.
Tech
Continue Reading
My Automated Lab project: #3 Create a Windows Server 2019 template in VMware vSphere with Packer
In my previous post I’ve created a Ubuntu template into VMware vSphere using Packer. Time to build now a Microsoft Windows template.
Tech
Continue Reading
My Automated Lab project: #2 Create a Ubuntu template in VMware vSphere with Packer
In my previous post I explained the tools I use in my lab automation. Today, we’ll talk about creating Ubuntu templates into VMware vSphere. For this, I will use Packer.
Tech
Continue Reading
My Automated Lab project: #1 Install and configure the needed tools
Raise your hand if you love to rebuild everytime your home lab manually! Noone, right? you either end up trying to not breaking it, thus defeating the purpose of the lab, or you spend insame amount of hours to fix it everytime, or to rebuilding it from scratch. So, automation in our home labs has always been a huge topic, and there are around many posts in these regards. So, why my own version? Because I found around some posts that I used to create my own automation, but none of them was perfect for my needs. I love beers, so let me use this example: like an home brewer (which I’m not, by the way) during this year I made my own recipe. It may not be the best one around, but it’s my own personal recipe. If you find it useful too, be my guest!
Tech
Continue Reading
Tunnel all your remote connections through ssh with a linux jumpbox
As many guys working in IT, I have my own lab. I usually prefer to use my own lab as the degree of freedom I can experience cannot be compared with a corporate lab. It often happens that some specific configurations (one for all, my vCloud Director environment) are better looking in my own lab than any other place, and so I also use my lab to show those technologies to partners and customers. This is easy when I’m at home, but I may be in an hotel room, in a conference room at the customer’s site, or another different place, and in many of these situations it may happen (and it happened enough times to justify this little project) that the connections to my lab are blocked by a firewall or another device. I have two ways to connect to my lab: an RDP to a jumpbox machine, published on a different port that the usual TCP/3389, and an ipsec vpn concentrator. In one case, none of them was possible at a customer, so we ended up with a colleague of mine tethering from his phone. I decided it was time to develop a better solution that was able to work in almost any situation. And my solution involves the always amazing SSH.
Tech
Continue Reading
A new server for my lab
My Lab is built basically as a production environment: it has 3 * 1RU Rack servers, gigabit switches and a couple of iSCSI/NFS Storage array. It nothing as a home lab, it’s noisy and it consume a good amount of electricity. I was lucky enough to have a good friend with some free space in his racks inside a datacenter, and he’s hosting my hardware gear for free. As time goes by however my hardware is becoming old and start to show its limits. At some point, I decided it was time for a hardware refresh.