Category Archives: Lab Infrastructure

Blocking Internet Access in a vCenter Lab with Selective Proxy Access

While troubleshooting a vCenter issue, I needed to replicate an environment where the vCenter Server had no internet access. This scenario is often seen in production but can be tricky to reproduce in a lab. This post will outline how … Continue reading

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MongoDB on Ubuntu: Replica Sets, LDAP, and Aria Operations

Last year I shared a series of posts walking through how to set up and monitor MongoDB with Aria Operations. For reference, here are those articles: When I originally created those posts, Mongo DB had not yet added support for … Continue reading

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Simplify Snapshot Management with VCF Operations

Managing snapshots in vSphere environments is a task that folks have dealt with for years. I remember one of my first PowerCLI scripts was one that sent email notifications for snapshots over a week old to review and manually clean … Continue reading

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Monitoring a Raspberry Pi with Telegraf and Aria Operations

I recently set out to configure the open-source Telegraf agent on a physical system in my lab, with the goal of sending telemetry data to Aria Operations. The process for setting this up is documented here: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/aria/aria-operations/8-18/vmware-aria-operations-configuration-guide-8-18/connect-to-data-sources/monitoring-applications-and-os-using-open-source-telegraf/monitoring-applications-using-open-source-telegraf/monitoring-applications-using-open-source-telegraf-on-a-linux-platform-saas-onprem.html. Since most of … Continue reading

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How to Increase VMXNET3 Link Speed for Nested ESXi Hosts

I recently came across a KB article (https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/368812/how-to-change-the-vmxnet3-link-speed-of.html) that describes how to set the link speed of a vmxnet3 network adapter higher than the default 10 Gbps speed. In my lab I have several nested ESXi hosts and wanted to … Continue reading

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