Home Labs « Everything Virtual

vCSA 5.1u1 Update in 7 Steps

In a recent post I showed you how to update your hosts from 5.1 to 5.1u1, whilst it was a nice and simple exercise you mustn’t forget that you also need to update your vCenter server (or in this case appliance).

Following the steps below you will now update your vCSA appliance from 5.1 to [...]

vCenter Server 5.1 – Windows 2012 Now Supported

With the release last week of vSphere 5.1 Update 1 one of the things that was announced was the ability to install vCenter Server on Windows 2012, as my recent overhaul of the HomeLab included an upgrade to Windows 2012 across the environment I had to use the vCSA instead of 2012 because vCenter used [...]

ESXi 5.1u1 Upgrade in 7 Steps

So with the release of ESXi 5.1 Update 1 last week it meant I needed to upgrade my home lab environment, using the following steps allowed me to do this really quickly and with little fuss.

1. Place the Host into Maintenance Mode and ensure that there are no running VM’s on the host.

2. [...]

Slipstreaming SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2

As I mentioned in a previous post I have decided to refresh my home lab to running Windows Server 2012, part of the installation requirements was installing SQL Server 2008 R2 into the new 2012 environment, easy you may think however it’s not as simple as that because whilst trying to install SQL 2008 R2 [...]

Installing the vCSA 5.1 Appliance

In my old lab I ran a lot of Windows 2008 R2 based infrastructure, not only was I running a fully deployed Active Directory Domain but I also had SQL 2008 R2 and SCCM 2007 but I was also running vCenter on 2008R2 as well, the main reason for this was due to the limitations [...]

Home Lab 2013 – The Next Generation

For the last couple of years I have been happy using the Lenovo TS200 servers as my basis for my home lab environment, unfortunately with the restriction of 16GB ram per server (32GB if I purchased completely new ram at far too expensive costs) and my ever increasing pool of VMs running on my hosts [...]

vSphere Web Client – What does it mean for the third party management app suppliers? – Update

Earlier this week I asked what it would mean for the mobile app publishers now that VMware had introduced a decent Web Client for vSphere 5, the reason for the post was because it looked like the web client would be all that was needed for the mobile user to manage their vSphere infrastructure, it [...]