Homelab: VCF 9 in a box
February 3, 2026
Step-by-step guide to building a compact VCF 9 homelab: hardware BOM, licensing options, 2-node tweaks, ESXi install, and deployment tips. … More Homelab: VCF 9 in a box
Category: homelab
Extending my homelab with the vExpert gift
January 5, 2023
People that follow me on Twitter, know that we (vExperts) received an awesome gift from Cohesity. During VMware Explore in Barcelona we received a NUC for our homelab. How cool is that, an excellent gift to extend my homelab. Content blog article 1. Extra hardware Like with any NUC, you need to buy some extra … More Extending my homelab with the vExpert gift
Lessons learned: upgrading homelab from 8.3 to 8.8
July 14, 2022
Accepting the role as Belgian VMUG leader made me seriously neglect my homelab. So once I’ve found some time again to focus on my homelab, all my licenses and passwords were expired and I had to upgrade from 8.3 to 8.8. Because I’ve deployed everything with LCM I had to do it step-by-step, and for … More Lessons learned: upgrading homelab from 8.3 to 8.8
Homelab: Installing vROps/vRNI & Log Insight
March 27, 2021
A huge advantage of being a vExpert is that you have a lot of licenses at your disposal. So if you have the necessary hardware, you can test a lot of products. Today I’ll be deploying vROps / vRNI & Log insight with LCM. Content blog article Upload vRNI to LCM Create environments vRLI config … More Homelab: Installing vROps/vRNI & Log Insight
My vSphere 7 Homelab
February 7, 2021
Till today I was able to run a basic setup on my developer workstation with 64GB of RAM. But once you want to start working with several products as vSphere, vRA & NSX it just doesn’t cut it anymore. So I finally decided to invest in a real homelab for further experimenting. However, the only … More My vSphere 7 Homelab
How to build my ESXi Home lab in the cloud (part4) – Deploy ESX’es
June 19, 2019
Today, in part 4 we will create our ESX’es. 1. Go to the tab VMs. You need to click on the “+ sign” if you don’t see a list of available VMs to add. 2. Click on the “+ sign” next to the “Empty ESX”. 3. In the general tab we update the Name & … More How to build my ESXi Home lab in the cloud (part4) – Deploy ESX’es
How to build my ESXi Home lab in the cloud (part3) – Deploy FreeNAS
June 3, 2019
In this 3rd episode we will configure our shared storage for our home lab.We will take care of that with a FreeNAS VM which is available in the Ravello repo => linkSearch for FreeNAS and click on “Add to Library”. 1. Create the FreeNAS VM 1. We go to the tab VMs. You need to … More How to build my ESXi Home lab in the cloud (part3) – Deploy FreeNAS
How to build my ESXi Home lab in the cloud (part2) – Deploy DC
May 17, 2019
In this second part of my blog we’ll configure our networking and build our first windows server that will function as our DC / DNS / NTP / …. 1. Create an application 1. In your Ravello dashboard you go to Applications and click on “Create application” 2. You give your application a name and … More How to build my ESXi Home lab in the cloud (part2) – Deploy DC
How to build my ESXi Home lab (part1)
May 12, 2019
Finally, I decided to get a home lab to prepare for my VMware certifications and to play around with upgrades and features. But then I realized it’s just the start of my journey. So many questions that suddenly pop-up. What do I get? How big is my budget? Do I want to pick and choose … More How to build my ESXi Home lab (part1)
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