Getting more out my home fiber internet with 10Gbe

In January of 2023, I was coming to the end of a multi-year promo with Videotron (Quebec) via my legacy cable modem. My normal speeds were pretty good, but definitely some room for improvement with my upload channel ; as I primarily WFH, I’m constantly using my upload channel for video calls as well as

Disable persistent scratch log(s) on home lab ESXi hostss

NOTE: The following advice would NOT be for prod workloads where you may require scratch logs to be persisted between reboots should you need to send them to your hardware vendor or VMware directly Hopefully you find this blog post while searching for a solution as I did this week, I had to cobble together

Home lab winter 2023 update – Desktop vs server hardware decision making process

It’s 2023, and time to re-visit my favorite topic: THE HOME LAB Last month, I took a new job focusing as a solutions architect implementing hypervisor / datacenter products for VMware & Nutanix. My new job is still with https://iti.ca/en/, and I’m happy to keep it in the family and not have to start over

TEAMS /turbo mode in 2023? Capturing memory usage with a PowerShell one-liner

For the past few years, I’ve repeated the same (somewhat lame) joke about how to optimize teams, it goes like this: Obviously, this was only half-serious. It’s easier said than done to exit Teams at this point. Like a lot of folks who can contrast the UX of Teams vs slack on a daily basis.

Hyper-V to VMware conversion tips and tricks

As an IT consultant , I’m asked to assist a wide variety of tasks. Last fall , I worked on a project to convert 21 Hyper-V VMs to ESXi. Normally, you’d use the VMware vSphere stand-alone converter for such a task, however, VMware pulled the tool in Feb of 2022, only to add it back

2x methods to list installed apps by Powershell

Microsoft doesn’t provide a GUI native way to export the apps you see as below. Why? I don’t know, but via CMD you’ve got a few options. I often use scripts from my co-worker Jon Pitre (GitHub), so I’ve already got the PowerShell app deploy toolkit installed, so, I can just run the following code

The car search continues & concludes

From July 2021 to August 2022, I went on an epic # of test drives , 30 in total. I ended up purchasing a lovely Subaru WRX 2011 with a manual transmission. You can read more about my criteria / experience in my original blog post HERE Some pix of the Subaru WRX . I

Extending OS drives on EFI based systems the ez way?

INTRO Hello friends, has this ever happened to you, you spill red wine on your white couch and don’t know what to do? Kidding aside, surely you’ve run into this issue before? You note the C drive on your windows VM is running low, extend the disk on your hypervisor, on opening diskmgmt.msc, you see

Home lab 2022 update – house edition

It’s time for my favorite topic, home planning and upgrading 😁 This article will cover changes I’ve made or have planned based on the move to my house. You can read through in it’s entirety or skip to the respective sections for compute hosts, case/rack, networking, storage, hypervisor choices, desk workspace area, UPS, and monitoring

My 1st house!

Odd as it sounds, as of May 2022, I’d never been a property owner (house/condo). A trip to Arizona inspired me to become a home owner. Why? Long-term, I’d like to do as my parents do, and become a snowbird. They travel to Florida each winter from Winnipeg, MB, Canada where I grow up. Montreal,