lab

That title is a bit of a mouthful, but it’s Friday night and that’s the best I’ve got! I was recently working through some recovery scenarios for NSX in the lab, as I was interested to understand what the process was for various scenarios such as: Losing NSX Manager and restoring Losing NSX Manager, DLR and ESG’s and restoring Losing the entire cluster (including ESXi hosts) and restoring NSX manager in to a new cluster The third scenario is reasonably obscure, and I’m not sure if you would follow a different restore process than what I did if this did actually happen.

I was recently chatting to a few guys regarding powering on and off VMs within a vSphere lab and using a script to do so in some sort of controlled manner (or force power off everything if desired). A few of us had a quick search, and couldn’t see anything that met the requirements of being able to power on and power off the lab, as well as place VMs into some sort of priority group.

So last week I received a new lab server that is going to be housed at home. It is a Dell T430 with 128GB ram, which is exactly what I was after as I want to get right back into the lab work, but I didn’t want a heap of gear and network requirements. NestedESXi has worked reasonably well in the past few vSphere releases and there’s not much that can’t be simulated within a nested environment for the purposes of learning or testing.