Home Lab: Migrating from ESX to Proxmox

I recently converted my home lab virtualization environment from vSphere\ESX to Proxmox and documented some of the useful tools and commands I used to do so. A little history My lab environment has gone through MANY iterations, both in hypervisor and storage: https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2016/04/25/homelab-a-few-weeks-with-xenserver-and-nutanix https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2016/04/04/upgrades-lab-local-ssd-hypervisors https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2015/07/16/backup-vmware-with-veeam-free-powershell-and-freenas https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2014/07/01/backing-up-vmware-virtual-machines-on-freenas-aspx https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2014/06/14/vmware-on-freenas-the-right-way-aspx https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2013/09/07/starwind-san-v8-beta-initial-testing-aspx https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2013/02/20/freenas-esx-and-nfs-synchronous-writes-and-the-zil-aspx Learning a variety of hypervisors was due mostly to my background in consulting and I’ve tried or used most of the major hypervisors available: HyperV, XenServer, … Read more…

Homelab: A few weeks with XenServer and Nutanix

Earlier this month I completely re-worked my homelab – with both storage and hardware upgrades as well as the underlying hypervisors. If you’re interested in the changes made, see this post here. So how has the experience with the new gear been? In no particular order, here’s my notes: Miscellaneous Not having to burn 8+GB for a vCenter VM is nice – especially for a lab XenCenter console is far simpler and less of a resource … Read more…

Upgrades to the Lab: Local SSD and Hypervisors

Take a look at the #HomeLab hashtag on twitter, and you will see lots of technology experts that have some pretty extensive lab environments at home – add me to that list. OK I’ve been on that list for a while…my lab has gone through numerous iterations: Started with Hyper-V initial release (2008 – KB950050) Ran StarWind Virtual SAN for a while – great performance offloading cache to RAM Moved away from local storage to SAN\NAS … Read more…