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ESXi-Arm V2 Easter Egg

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A new version of the ESXi-Arm Fling (V2) was recently released and the major update to the ESXi-Arm V2 Fling is that it is now based on the latest ESXi 8.x codebase, which is currently 8.0 Update 3b. In my blog post, I had hinted there was a small easter egg 🐣 the Engineering team had included in the ESXi-Arm Fling update, which I did not know about until they had mentioned it!

Since no one has officially found the easter egg, I figured it might be time to break the silence and share as I think it can actually benefit some users based on their usage of ESXi, especially from a testing and/or learning perspective such as playing with the vSphere API as just one example.

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Tips & Tricks for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using Holodeck

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The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit has become quite popular amongst our field teams for quickly spinning up a fully self-contained VCF environment, running on just a single physical ESXi host for educational and hands on experience.

Internally, we have a Holodeck Google Space which has been getting quite busy where folks can ask questions but also share their own experiences and setup using Holodeck. I had noticed there were some common questions and themes that were coming up along with some neat tips and tricks from various folks, some of which I also found quite insightful.

I know some of these tips and tricks will also benefit our customers and partners looking to deploy VCF using Holodeck, so I figure I put together a consolidated list that would benefit everyone. If you have other Holodeck tips and tricks, feel free to leave a comment and happy to keep updating this page.

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How to setup private GitLab on a Synology for Project Keswick?

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My recent blog post on setting up a custom vSphere Content Library on my Synology gave me another idea that I had been thinking about regarding Project Keswick, which was announced back at VMware Explore Las Vegas.

If you have network connectivity to the Keswick Cloud Service, you can easily associate a Git repository, which is used for host configurations and workload deployments using GitOps using Github or even a privately managed Gitlab instance. For organizations that have additional compliance, security or air-gapped requirements, using the Keswick Cloud Service may not be an option. With that said, Project Keswick also supports an advanced deployment option where the association of a Git repository, such as GitLab, can also be accomplished without requiring the use of the Keswick Cloud Service.

While I have had experience using both Github as well as GitLab, which VMware uses to host its own code repository, I have actually never setup my own GitLab instance before. I thought this would be a great learning opportunity, especially with the ability to run additional add-on applications on a Synology.

After a bit of researching online, I found that GitLab can easily run as a Container workload and it just so happens that the Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) has a package for running containers creatively called Container Manager and below are the step by step instructions for setting up GitLab running on Synology DSM 7.2.

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