Where have I been?

Wow! It truly has been a while since I last posted. Gee whiz! Well, to sum things up, I’ve been busy. I’m not excusing my absence other than, life has been running me ragged. But I am here. 

Since my last post, I have celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary, been re-elected into the vExpert program, participated in Hands On Labs at VMWorld 2019, and continue to push and evangelize the things I learn around the vRealize Suite of products. Matter of fact, keep on the look out for an upcoming post about utilizing workload placement within a vRealize Automation instance using vRealize Operations. (I’m working on this little gem.)

As you are already aware, many announcements were made at VMWorld US & Europe. In preparation of all of the news products that have been released since VMWorld, I am currently rebuilding my homelab. I know…. not again. It seems like I am constantly rebuilding this thing. Well, that is kind of true.

I’m sure you are asking, ‘well, why don’t you upgrade?’ That’s a good question. Let me provide my opinion on this. There’s a few reasons why I am building new and not upgrading. 

The primary reason I am not upgrading my environment is because it has gone through a couple of upgrades already. And since this is a homelab, I put it through its paces – a lot. It has had a few lingering issues that I did not want to carry forward.

My homelab environment runs on top of vCloud Director. I mimic what we do for HOL so that I may be able to learn and create ‘customer-like scenarios’ side-by-side to my home lab. As I stated above, my version of vCD was a version of 8 that was upgraded to 9.0, then 9.1. I want to move to vCD 10 — part of me wants to try out the vCD Appliance. 

Additionally, a couple of the products have gone through some platform changes. While this may introduce some complexity regarding upgrading, I didn’t want to apply figuring out that process on top of learning the new products – yet. 

Over the next few weeks while I rebuild my homelab, I will continue to post things I learn and discover that may be of use to others.