Category Archives: Lab Infrastructure

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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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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