Category Archives: Lab Infrastructure

An Unexpected Benefit of Application-Aware Backups: Finding and Fixing Database Bloat

While working on my recent post about why crash-consistent VM backups aren’t always enough, I ran into an unexpected but very useful side effect of adding application-aware database backups. Once I started creating regular database dumps for my phpIPAM instances, … Continue reading

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Why Crash-Consistent VM Backups Aren’t Always Enough

In lab and small-scale environments, it’s common to rely almost entirely on VM-level backups. That’s exactly how my lab is built: a single virtual machine runs several services I depend on regularly, and it’s protected by a daily, CBT-enabled backup … Continue reading

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Did You Know VMCA Can Issue Certificates for Other Services?

VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) is used within vSphere to secure connections between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts, but what if we need certificates for other systems? In a previous post, I used group policy to add the VMCA Root CA … Continue reading

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Simplifying Certificate Trust in Multi-Lab Environments

In my lab I have a jump box that I typically use for management. It is joined to active directory and automatically trusts my primary CA root certificate. This CA issued the Machine SSL certificate for my vCenter Server, so … Continue reading

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Simulating vCenter Server Connection Failures with iptables

I was recently testing an application and wanted to see how it would behave if its connection to vCenter Server was interrupted. Would the process auto-recover? Would I need to restart a service? To find out, I simulated a connection … Continue reading

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