I’ve started using ProtonVPN on my home Internet connection. With the ever increasing pressure on ISPs to share customer information to government agencies and copyright trolls, I felt more and more uncomfortable having this metadata accessible, and I figured it was now time to go the VPN route to at least shield my metadata from the ISP. I didn’t do this to obscure browsing metadata from websites or hide which country I’m in, though. I’m …
Nirmata is the cross-cloud orchestrator of orchestrators
You might know I am a fan of removing complexity at the infrastructure layer so IT folks can focus on higher levels in the stack, preferably applications, data and information. An example I usually refer to is Platform9, who made OpenStack stupidly simple. I wrote about Platform9 and the underlying concepts here: Can Platform9 solve fundamental OpenStack challenges? Can Platform9 simplify OpenStack by making it invisible? A Platform9 architecture deep dive: is it still ‘simple’ …
Fixing issues with your RDMs after upgrading ESXi to 6.5.0d
I run a Supermicro Xeon-D based for home lab purposes. One of the VMs on the Lab is my fileserver, which has four physical 3TB disks passed through as RDMs. You can read more on my (pretty awesome) home lab, since it’s physically small, but very powerful and incredibly versatile: Running a virtual gaming rig using a Xeon D server, a GFX 750Ti, PCI passthrough and a Windows 10 VM Build a Xeon D-1500 (Open) Home Lab …
How Docker’s secure software supply chain is key for moving away from the VMware datacenter
At DockerCon this week, I sat in on a Tech Field Day Extra (TFDx) event and we talked about how to move existing applications into the Docker ecosystem. As a CTO for a company that does a lot of legacy enterprise stuff and End-User Support, I deal with legacy applications on a daily basis. To put this into context: these are, in 99% of the cases, commodity applications provided by a commercial ISV in an …
NLVMUG UserCon 2017
Op 16 maart 2017 vindt de jaarlijkse UserCon van de NLVMUG weer plaats. Dit is het grote evenement van de Nederlandse VMware User Group, en staat als vanouds barstensvol goede sessies, keynotes, workshops en een beursvloer. Samen met Dennis en Arjan ben ik hard aan het sleutelen aan de agenda. Keynotes De technische keynote wordt dit jaar verzorgd door niemand minder dan Frank Denneman en gaat praten over ‘VMware vCloud on AWS’: VMware vSphere is het …
Running a virtual gaming rig using a Xeon D server, a GFX 750Ti, PCI passthrough and a Windows 10 VM
My home lab is a beasty Xeon D-based server with 128GB of RAM, chock-full of storage (fast NVMe and SSD as well as four 3.5″ 3 TiB disks), a quad-core Xeon D-1521 and two 10-gig ethernet interfaces. More than adequate as a server, and it comes in a small and silent package. The goal was to have just a single machine in the house to fulfil all the different scenarios: A home lab server, running ESXi and …
Nutanix Acropolis Microsegmentation Services goes head-to-head with VMware’s NSX
During this week’s .NEXT event in Vienna, Nutanix announced a networking & security product line-up called Acropolis Microsegmentation Services. And you’ve guessed it, it’s a direct competitor of VMware’s NSX. I bet this is going to piss off a lot of folks at VMware, especially given NSX’s awful track record (regarding stability and number of critical bugs) lately. I mean, look at this quote from the press release: Microsegmentation technologies have been available for some time to …
The end of the OS as we know it: the Rise of the Unikernel
Gareth Rushgrove posted an article recently, called The End of the General Purpose Operating System, in which he explained how he sees the operating system becoming an implementation detail of the higher level software. By general purpose OS I’m referring to what most people use for server workloads today – be it RHEL or variants like CentOS or Fedora, or Debian and derivatives like Ubuntu. By end I don’t literally mean they go away or stop being …
Cisco MetaPod: Managed OpenStack for enterprisy enterprises
About a month ago, I had the opportunity to sit in on a presentation discussing Cisco’s MetaPod product. As a fan of Platform9’s OpenStack-as-a-Service approach, I was curious to see Cisco’s approach. Stuff-as-a-Service I like stuff as a service, especially when the stuff is hard to do yourself. The value add for a company to do Stuff-as-a-Service is their extensive knowledge about the stuff. They can automate it, make it self-healing (from at least a service perspective, but …
The best way to update Supermicro BIOS is via Supermicro Update Manager
I recently found a very easy way to upgrade a Supermicro BIOS. It entails getting an out-of-band license key for the Supermicro BMC IPMI interface. This allows you to use the BMC IPMI to upgrade BIOS versions. Best thing: no more need to roll your own (usually ill-working) DOS-based boot media. Read up on this method in my previous post The better way to update Supermicro BIOS is via IPMI. Part of getting the license key to unlock BIOS …