Today is a sad day. After just over fifteen years of having a computer lab environment at home, I have decided the time has come to decommission it. The bandwidth and energy requirements have become too much, and I can no longer justify having one in my current role. Continue reading
Lab
My (self-inflicted) VSAN nightmare
A few weeks back I completely refreshed my homelab to include three new hosts and VMware VSAN. Despite being initially pleased with the setup, there was one job I forgot to do before configuring VSAN.
And it has been pain all the way since. Continue reading
Upping my homelab game
Recently I’ve been toying with the idea of a homelab refresh. My current Dell and Cisco hardware has performed well over the years, and is still very powerful. However new technologies such as All-Flash VSAN and Azure Stack require enterprise-level hardware such as 10GbE and vast amounts of memory. Continue reading
Wednesday Tidbit: Shutdown your lab with one click
Recently I’ve found myself having to shutdown my home lab quite often as the weather has been better than expected and the temperature has risen dramatically. Great for sitting in beer gardens, not so good for the lab.
To speed up the process of shutting down all my VMs (currently 68 of them) I decided to knock up a very simple PowerCLI script:
# Variables
$esxi = "esxi.mdb-lab.com"
$credential = Get-Credential
Connect-VIServer $esxi -Credential $credential
Get-VM | where {$_.Powerstate -eq "PoweredOn"} | Shutdown-VMGuest -Confirm:$false
Start-Sleep -s 600
Stop-VMHost -Confirm:$false -Force:$true
Disconnect-VIserver $esxi -Confirm:$false
Definitely not rocket science, but the greatest scripts don’t always have to be complicated.
There are a lot of other devices (storage and networking equipment) that also have to be scripted to shutdown, but this is a start.
