Over the weekend, I learned the hard way what happens when you deviate from Vmware’s HCL list.Many months back, I’d decided on HP EX920 1TB NVM drives for my home lab ESXI 6.7 U1 hostsFor reference, the hardware for my hosts is level-set as follows:HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF (not on vmware HCL)Intel Core i5-6500 CPU…

In my last post on the topic of home lab upgrades, I’d stated I was going to use Intel Q370 based mobo’s to satisfy a long-standing need for IPMI/OOB/Lights-out mgmt of my various virtualization hosts That plan has now changed, as I’ve deiced to go with a more scalable solution that won’t lock me in…

Last year, I bought a few new used HP computers via eBay to build-out my VMware lab setup -A EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF – which has a Intel core i5 6500 CPU, non-hyper threaded!-A HP Prodesk 400 G3 mini – which has a Intel core i5 6500T CPU, non-hyper threaded! This is the 2nd of…

My current lab environment supports a few goals: Stay sharp with Microsoft active directory and group policy Keep up to date with windows server versions: 2003, 2008, 2012R2, 2016 > beyond Keep up to date with the windows desktop OS family Keep my hardware skills sharp by continuing to build my own desktops and servers…

I’ve had Sonos gear for about 5 years now. 4 units, great little speakers – when they work! Case in point, I disabled SMB v1 on my win 2016 hyper-v based file server this weekend, only to discover that the default (as in only) SMB format that Sonos supports to enumerate/connect to windows shares is…

I’m going through a multi-stage upgrade to my aged home lab hardware, part 1 includes mostly storage items, 4 of those items arrived today!1x WD Red 7200 RDP 10 TB HDD for file server1x mATA  to M.2 HDD adapter for file server1TB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 HDD2x 8 GB DDR3l SODIMMS for Gigabyte Brix (ESXi…