With vSphere 8 comes vSAN 8, and with it a slew of improvements and even a brand new architecture option! This new optional next generation architecture is built into vSAN 8, and going forward customers can choose which architecture to deploy; vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) or vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA).

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VMware announces vSphere 8 — The Enterprise Workload Platform at VMware Explore US 2022. The new release comes with a number of new features and enhancements. Read more for a quick summary of changes and enhancements.

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Last week, I worked with a customer on what was seemingly a straightforward VMware vCenter 7 certificate replacement job but encountered several red herrings that also turned out to be issues that needed solving. I thought I’d share these in this post, in the hope that they can help others in future. The initial issue was that during the summer holidays, the customer’s certificates had expired, and they were presented with “Error 503, service unavailable” messages when trying to log into vSphere Client. While renewing certificates with certificate-manager in vCenter BASH Shell via SSH the services got stuck at 85%, and then failed to start after several minutes.

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VMware has released an updated version of KB85685 SD card/USB boot device revised guidance (85685). Previous versions of this KB stated that in the next major version of ESXi SD Card / USB boot would be deprecated and unsupported. This has now changed, as the updated version dated 27th of April 2022 states that this will still be supported in the next major version.

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My new lab is based on Dell OptiPlex 7090 UFF hosts and after enabling vSAN on the four node cluster, the first two hosts I set up started having issues, especially with the cache devices. It seems that they just disappear from the host, especially when doing IO-intensive operations like changing the vSAN policy for a few VMs from RAID-1 to RAID-5. Once the host is rebooted, the device is back in place, seemingly without issues until the next time it disappears. Strangely this was not a problem before I configured vSAN, and only used the same devices as local datastores.

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Installing Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) on vSphere is well documented on the tanzucommunityedition.io site, but I ran into a couple of small quirks when installing it in my home lab.

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For years now my homelab has been a single Dell Precision T7500 host, with a total of 24 GB RAM and a few TB of locally attached disks. I also had a small Synology DS216play and a very old HP MicroServer N36L that I ran FreeNAS on. A few months back, the MicroServer decided to call it quits after many, many years of service (it was released in May 2010!). To replace it I got ordered a new Synology DS920+, which again forced me into have a proper look at my entire home lab environment. The conclusion was very clear; My home lab environment was in dire need of a complete overhaul!

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Back in November 2021, VMware vSphere Update 3 was released and then ultimately retracted again due to critical issues with the code base and upgrade procedures — For details, see KB article 86398.

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Heard of Caddy 2? If not, here’s a quick intro on how I currently use it. Note that I am barely toucing the surface of what it can do, but after I have a couple of simple, yet very handy use cases for it:

Reverse Proxy and Static File Server.

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I recently bought a Google Nest Hub 2nd gen and wanted to use it as a dashboard device for Home Assistant (HA). Now. the Google Nest Hub is not really meant used like this, as there is no real way of installing 3rd party apps on it, such as the Home Assistant app. Thankfully there are ways to get it to display Lovelace Dashboards from HA, and here is how I solved it with local network access only.

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