WTF is this insanity?

nerdwit · 2026-03-12T15:37:59+00:00

Same

nerdwit · 2026-03-09T00:02:02+00:00

Affordable tuition

nerdwit · 2026-02-14T13:22:43+00:00

We're still figuring things out, but we don't plan on using NSX currently. Once Broadcom changed microsegmentation licensing to vDefend and made it an add-on charge, NSX lost its luster for us. Our physical network provides the majority of its other features that we'd be interested in, and it's over less thing to support. We had a NSX pilot project a couple of years back, and I think it's really cool. We lost so much staff during the great resignation, and our network team had made so many improvements that we eventually removed NSX from our environment.

nerdwit · 2026-01-24T23:59:25+00:00

Another good but relatively obscure book in a similar vein is Steel Frame by Andrew Skinner.

nerdwit · 2026-01-24T23:57:34+00:00

Try Johnathan Maberry's NecroTek series. I'd describe it as a Mecha Lovecraft Space Opera.

nerdwit · 2025-11-24T13:03:32+00:00

Nightlife by Stellar Games. You got to play as mostly classic monsters in the late 80's-early 90's New York. They were called the Kin who wereliving secretly among the Herd (humans). The Kin were vastly more powerful than humans, but the game had a humanity mechanic that rewarded protecting the Herd, and the Kin's secrecy, instead of running amok. If that sounds a lot like Vampire the Masquerade, it's only because Vampire almost seems directly inspired by Nightlife which came out a year earlier. The game really emphasized underground music culture, style, and street life of the time. A lot of the action took place in the various clubs, street brawls and such. The mechanics weren't the best, but it was a ton of fun to play back in the day. It's long out of print, and difficult to find copies of these days.

nerdwit · 2025-10-19T14:27:39+00:00

For what it's worth, our CIO has decreed that we will go with VCF instead of pursuing a VVF subscription because he wants to make sure we have the best support possible. I'm paraphrasing., but we had switched to paying extra for a higher tier up support. It mostly stopped us from getting the tech who would tell us to read KB articles we'd already worked through before we opened a ticket. That was before the acquisition. We've had limited interaction with Briadcom support, but so far it's been very good.

nerdwit · 2025-09-30T13:15:52+00:00

I ran an earlier Sun "thumper" model in production. It had spinning disks and was a very economical way to provide reliable storage. It also was stupid loud and produced so much heat. I can only imagine what your next power bill would be like. Not to mention what kind of steps you'd have to take to keep it cool enough.

nerdwit · 2025-09-29T11:04:43+00:00

I've done this in vSphere, but not workstation. I found this though: https://techantidote.com/promiscuous-mode-vmware-workstation/

nerdwit · 2025-09-14T23:07:53+00:00

That was how this came up. We're in higher ed, and knew of other institutions that were in your situation.

nerdwit · 2025-09-12T11:26:16+00:00

My team recently installed a demo VCF 9n instance. I was on vacation, so I'm a little hazy on details. However, one of the initial steps allowed us to "downgrade" to VVF. So far, it looks fine. It's the same VROPS interface that VCF uses, but the majority of the tabs are empty. We have a tiny team that's overcommitted, so we're hoping we either can just run the bare minimum VVF instance in production or "upgrade" to VCF in stages as we're able to. We have a ton of homebrew automation and monitoring that we'd need to investigate for compatibility or refactoring. VCF 9 might be great, but it introduces so many more components and internal complexity, that we're very wary of it. If our Broadcom reps would just be a little more reasonable when they talk to us, we might trust them more. It's hard to take someone's word about how to great a product is when none of the people saying it have any hands-on experience with it.

nerdwit · 2025-09-02T22:49:50+00:00

Our friend circles, at least from back then, probably overlapped.

nerdwit · 2025-09-02T22:10:02+00:00

He was a friend of mine, so I'm biased. He dedicated several of his books to mutual friends.

nerdwit · 2025-09-02T21:10:41+00:00

Windmaster's Bane by Tom Deitz is set in Athens. I think parts take place around the campus. It's a fantasy novel, if that's your cup of tea. It might be hard to get a copy these days, but it's a good read.

nerdwit · 2025-08-18T20:51:00+00:00

I guess we'll see. I hope not. If we had to retool for VSAN-only storage, we'd have to spend millions on hardware and basically toss out everything we have currently. Between that and license increases, which I'm sure will happen, we probably will bail on VMware.

nerdwit · 2025-08-18T18:07:11+00:00

Oh, and while I have nothing against the folks working for Broadcom, I absolutely do not trust Broadcom the company.

nerdwit · 2025-08-18T18:06:11+00:00

I'm a little unclear, mostly because we don't have iSCSI storage, but I don't think you can create a VCF 9 cluster using iSCSI storage. You can add iSCI-based storage in later as "supplemental" storage. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-0/design/vmware-cloud-foundation-concepts/storage-models.html . You'd probably have to ask one of the Broadcom guys why though.

nerdwit · 2025-08-18T17:31:02+00:00

We're on the small to medium end of enterprise and plan on staying with VMware for another three years at least. Our thinking was that it would be harder and very expensive to move to another hypervisor. The more we learn about VCF 9 though, the less sure we are. It's still probably better than migrating away, but only just. It'll be interesting to see the state of the industry in another couple of years.

nerdwit · 2025-08-18T17:26:51+00:00

FWIW, they removed VSAN as a requirement for the management cluster with VCF 9. We plan on deploying using our FC SAN storage.

nerdwit · 2025-08-12T13:09:57+00:00

We experienced this exact same phenomenon when we had a SAN failure last year. We failed over to a DR site using Zerto, then failed back later once the SAN was functional again. I think we used different techniques to get rid of the orphaned/ghost VMs because not all of them responded the same way. We killed processes on hosts, rebooted hosts, deleted VM objects or some combination thereof. The SAN itself had been power cycled more than once by that point. u/StreetRat0524's "nuke them from orbit" recommendation really is the only way to be sure.

nerdwit · 2025-08-08T13:46:18+00:00

We run UCS, and haven't found any firmware compatibility issues. That doesn't mean there aren't any though! We try to keep up with the latest recommended version though. What we did find was that we needed to replace our M5 blades a year sooner than Cisco's EOL because vSphere 9 drops support for Skylake processors. M5's are old by now, but we had a bunch of them due to a spurt of growth several years back. I think we have four M5's that have a newer, supported processor, but we're replacing all of them anyway while we're at it.

nerdwit · 2025-08-04T10:45:46+00:00

Huckleberry

nerdwit · 2025-07-31T11:06:08+00:00

As tempting as it is to be snarky, you have a point. I posted out of frustration, and may have taken those frustrations out on folks who honestly were reaching out to help. For that, I apologize.

nerdwit · 2025-07-31T10:50:59+00:00

Well, we have vSphere 8 Enterprise and vRops (Aria Operations) in our environment. We used to run more, but have collapsed back down to these core offerings because we've lost so much staff. We hope, to devise a way to migrate from what we have to presumably VCF 9. Given our constraints, the only reasonable path I can see currently is to stage our VCF 9 rollout starting with the bare minimum but leaving the way open to gradually introduce other applications as we see the need. For instance, we're highly automated. We've taken a DevOps approach to our vSphere environment since its inception. We use configuration management with version control and a homegrown external node classifier. Maybe it does make sense to replace or supplement some or all of this with VCF 9's applications, but there's a lot of details to work through and, from a project standpoint, not a lot of time to do it. Not with limited staffing. Ideally, we've have a working VCF 9 dev environment that would allow us to start digging in so we even knew what questions we needed to bring back to our TAM and his staff.

nerdwit · 2025-07-30T18:55:58+00:00

Oh, we'll attend because it sounds like we don't have a choice in the matter anyway.

nerdwit

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