Everyone is migrating from VMware to Proxmox. Blog posts, Reddit threads, YouTube tutorials — the internet is flooded with guides on escaping VMware licensing costs and embracing the open-source promised land. It’s practically a movement. And then there’s me, going the other way. While the rest of the world is celebrating their freedom from vCenter, […]
Swimming Upstream: Exporting VMs from Proxmox to ESXi/vCenter Read Post »
I used to have a very simple monitoring strategy for my home lab: if the fans were spinning and the LEDs were blinking, everything was fine. If the room was quiet, I had a problem. While that approach has a certain rustic charm, it is terrible for uptime and even worse for troubleshooting. You can’t
Building a Scalable Monitoring Stack with Prometheus & Grafana Read Post »
In the first part of this series, we built the foundation of our automation framework: a clean directory structure, proper inventories, OS-specific variable separation, secure Vault usage, and the vCenter settings that glue everything together. Think of it as laying out all tools on the workbench before touching the actual machine. Now comes the fun
Provisioning a Windows 10 Client from a vSphere Template (2nd part) Read Post »
If you’ve ever deployed a VM in vSphere and caught yourself thinking, “There must be a faster way to do this,” you’re definitely not alone. After clicking through the same wizard more times than I’d like to admit, I decided it was time to build something cleaner, smarter, and fully automated. In this series, I’ll
In the first two parts of this series, I focused on building the foundation of a smart holiday home hub. In Part 1, I set up the hardware and base software stack: a Raspberry Pi 5 running Docker, Home Assistant, and Node-RED, designed to be compact, power-efficient, and easy to maintain remotely. Part 2 expanded
The Autonomous Holiday Home (Part 3): Self-Healing Power and Dual-WAN Failover Read Post »
In the previous post, we built the foundation of our automation system — Docker running on the Raspberry Pi, with Home Assistant, Node-RED, and Mosquitto working together.Everything is now alive and connected, but so far… it’s just a system waiting for data. Time to change that. At the vacation house, I already use a few
The Autonomous Holiday Home (Part 2): Connectivity and Sensor Monitoring with MQTT Read Post »
At our holiday home — a quiet place we visit just once or twice a year — I wanted to know exactly what’s happening there, even when we’re not around. Call it freak-control if you will, but when you have a heating system running through the winter and the power tends to drop every now
The Autonomous Holiday Home (Part 1): Building a Docker-Based Hub on Raspberry Pi 5 Read Post »
In the last post I proved the flow locally: Ansible talks to vCenter, clones from a template, and the VM comes up with our settings. That was the “manual gear.” Now I want the “automatic gear”—a GitLab pipeline that runs the same steps for me, consistently, from any commit. My goals are simple: keep secrets
VMware vSphere – Automating VM Deployment with Ansible and GitLab CI/CD – Part 3 Read Post »
In this post we move from lab setup to hands-on automation. The goal is to provision virtual machines on vSphere automatically by combining Ansible playbooks with a GitLab CI/CD pipeline. Everything lives as code in a Git repository: VM definitions, playbooks, and the pipeline that runs them. With a single commit, GitLab triggers Ansible, which
VMware vSphere – Automating VM Deployment with Ansible and GitLab CI/CD – Part 2 Read Post »
A few months ago, when I first came across a project where Ansible and GitLab CI/CD were used to automate VM deployments in VMware vCenter, I wasn’t directly responsible for writing the playbooks. My role was more on the VMware side — managing vCenter, handling ESXi administration, and preparing the YAML host files that Ansible
VMware vSphere – Automating VM Deployment with Ansible and GitLab CI/CD – Part 1 Read Post »