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Interesting VMware Homelab Kits for 2024

10.30.2024 by William Lam // 20 Comments

Where did 2024 go!? I can not believe there is only a few more months left before the end of the year!

During VMware Explore US, I had several folks ask whether I was going to publish a 2024 edition of my annual interesting VMware homelab kit blog post, simliar to HERE and HERE for 2023 and 2023 respectively. While I had planned for this originally, I was pretty busy this year and getting hands on with some of the latest Intel 14th Generation systems did not happen until much later and hence why I had not put anything together.

I was recently reminded of this request again and it feels like the right time to summarize the various kits that I have come across and/or have gotten hands on throughout the year.

Homelab Trends

There are also some interesting trends that I have observed in 2024, especially as it pertains to VMware Homelabs/Development/Testing purposes:

The support for non-binary DDR5 SODIMM memory modules has become the new norm and can enable small form factor systems to get up to 96GB of memory
Intel 14th (Consumer) CPU introduces a third core type (LPE) into its Hybrid architecture which has some implications as mentioned in my review of the ASUS NUC 14 Pro as an example
Having more M.2 NVMe or general NVMe slots will be extremely advantageous with the introduction of vSphere NVMe Memory Tiering capability
OCuLink supported peripherals, especially for external GPU and storage is slowly becoming a reality after its initial introduction in 2012 and may finally give Thunderbolt some competition

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Recovering ESXi 7.x & 8.x host after forgetting or losing root password

10.23.2024 by William Lam // 14 Comments

The general guidance and quickest way to recover an ESXi host if you have forgotten or lost the root password is to reset using vSphere Host Profiles if it was managed by vCenter Server or simply reinstall ESXi which would allow you to preserve the existing VMFS volumes along with any workloads that may reside on them.

In the past, it was also possible to reset the ESXi root password by booting the system into Linux and then manually updating the /etc/shadow file, which is simliar to how you could reset the password on a Linux-base system and you can find a number of blog articles outlining the details. With the introduction of the ESXi Configuration Store, the previous methodology no longer works for modern ESXi releases starting from ESXi 7.0 Update 1 and later.

Having said that, I know this is still a topic that comes up frequently, especially in the context of administrators joining a brand new company where the ESXi root password has not been properly documented or an admin being asked to support a random set of standalone ESXi hosts that have no owners. Regardless of the scenario, while a reinstallation is the quickest way to recover, it certainly would be nice to be able to maintain the original configuration, especially if there is no documentation to begin with.

While there has been various snippets of information shared online (here, here and here), which includes information from myself, I figured it might be good to figure out the latest process for recovering an ESXi 7.x or 8.x host without requiring a reinstallation.

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Quick Tip - Retrieving vSAN File Share Network Permissions using vSAN API & PowerCLI

10.16.2024 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

When creating a new vSAN File Share, which is powered by vSAN File Services, additional network access controls (no access, allow access from any IP or custom) can be configured.

To view the configured network permissions, users must expand each file share to get the relevant information. For those interesting in automating the retrieval of this information for reporting and/or compliance purposes, you can use the vSAN Management API and specifically the vSAN queryFileShares() API.

The vSAN File Share API can also be consumed through PowerCLI using the Get-VsanFileShare cmdlet, but the network permission configuration is not part of the default output which might lead users to believe this information is not available.

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