Building Templates Manually is Boring AF Quite a while back I did a post around leveraging HashiCorp’s Packer product to build vSphere Templates. There was a couple gaps that existed coming out of that post… I was wicked new to Packer and had much to learn The Packer post-provisioner was immature when it came to vSphere Template conversion, meaning, it couldn’t do it at the time Refresher on Packer What is Packer? Read more

<img src="/images/2018-04-22-vsphere-67-homelabs-unsupported-cpu/thumbnail.PNG#center" alt=“r710 Lives”;> TL;DR: The Dell R710 is a staple in the homelab community. Many individuals have indicated that their 11g (generation) CPU’s were not allowing them to upgrade to vCenter 6.7 due to the disallowed list located here. I was able to upgrade to vSphere 6.7 on my R710’s which use an L5630 (Westmere) CPU. I’ve seen evidence that many of the 56xx series CPU’s are still allowing upgrades, despite a warning being presented. Read more

This weekend I discovered Packer from HashiCorp. And My World Was Changed…Just Way After Everyone Else I had decided to add a few more catalog items to vRealize Automation and realized that I didn’t have any Ubuntu templates loaded in my environment. I figured I would load up a couple builds - specifically 16.04 and 17.04. I hopped on Google and started looking for best practices around configuring a Ubuntu template and stumbled upon articles discussing automating template builds with something called Packer. Read more