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Continue reading →: HomeLab Christmas Update 2026How the my Home-Lab evolved I published My HomeLab 2025 back in March 2025. At that time, the lab was very much a classic, single-location setup – x86-based ESXi hosts, shared storage, and an environment designed for day-to-day testing, learning, and validation. Since then, the lab has not grown dramatically…
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Continue reading →: When Distance Beats DefaultsFixing ESXi Not Responding States in a WAN-Connected Raspberry Pi 5 Homelab During the Christmas holidays, I turned a family visit into a distributed homelab setup. I deployed two ESXi on ARM hosts, each running on a Raspberry Pi 5, placed in two different houses of my family. Both sites…
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Continue reading →: UPS-Aware Shutdown for ESXiMy home lab is no longer a playground for experiments. It has evolved into a stable, reproducible, and deliberately designed infrastructure, closely aligned with real-world operational requirements. One topic that is often underestimated – even in professional environments – is power stability and failure handling. While a UPS protects hardware…
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Continue reading →: New VCF 9 Licensing Option Now Available Through VMUG AdvantageGreat news for all VMware home lab enthusiasts, especially those running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF):There is now an official and supported way to obtain VCF 9 licenses through VMUG Advantage. This change finally closes a major gap and provides the clarity many VMUG members have been waiting for since the…
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Continue reading →: When Your Home Lab Goes Dark: The VMware License Chaos After the Broadcom TakeoverRunning a VMware home lab used to be simple. You joined VMUG Advantage, activated your NFR keys, and had full freedom to explore new versions and updates. But since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, things have become far more complicated – especially for anyone who upgraded their lab to VCF 9.…
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Continue reading →: Demystifying the VCF Brownfield ToolWhen managing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments, administrators often face challenges in bringing existing infrastructure (brownfield) into the fold of a structured and automated VCF deployment. The VCF Brownfield Tool is designed to simplify this process, making it easier to onboard existing workloads, networks, and clusters into a VCF-managed state.…
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Continue reading →: Automating DNS Records with Ansible – Dynamic A and PTR Records from JSONManaging DNS entries manually can quickly become error-prone, especially in labs, test environments, or dynamic infrastructures where hosts and IP addresses change frequently. Automation with Ansible helps keep DNS zones consistent, saves time, and reduces mistakes. In this post, I’ll show how to create A and PTR records automatically from…
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Continue reading →: Using Ansible to List VMware VM Snapshots with Dynamic Inventory
Snapshots in VMware environments can be a double-edged sword: great for short-term recovery, but problematic if left unmanaged. In this post, I’ll show you how to use Ansible with a dynamic inventory to list all snapshots across your virtual machines (VMs) — and cleanly handle VMs without any snapshots. We’ll…
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Continue reading →: Dynamic Inventory for vSphere 9 with Ansible – A Practical Deep Dive
In the first part of this series, we laid the groundwork for using Ansible to automate VMware vSphere 9 environments. Now that we have our Ubuntu control node, VS Code environment, and connection to vCenter ready, it’s time to make things dynamic. Why Use Dynamic Inventory? Static inventory files are…
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Continue reading →: Automating VMware vSphere 9 with Ansible: A Practical Blog Series
This series guides experienced VMware admins through using Ansible to automate vSphere 9 tasks. We start by deploying an Ubuntu control node in vSphere 9, then configure VS Code with Git and SSH access, install Ansible and set up our inventory, and finally explore Ansible’s VMware modules with real examples. Part 1: Setting Up…
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Hallo,
I’m Lukas
Herzlich willkommen auf meinem Blog!
Hier teile ich meine Leidenschaften für Technologie, Abenteuer und Autos. Viel Spaß beim Lesen!
