Homelab on MichelleWayZ | Michelle Goossens | Blog

A New Start - With an update

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:45:00 +0000

Hi,

As part of my rebrand from an old domain I've had for many years to a new one that fits my identity better, I've succesfully migrated the blog to a new domain and new backend (it runs on a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster now). I've left a redirect in place, however please do try to update any URLs you might have from blog.masterwayz.nl to https://blog.michellewayz.com, as this will be the new URL going forward.

Quick Lab Tip: Deploy VCF workload domain with single NSX Manager

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 14:00:00 +0000

In this post I will share a quick tip on how I've managed to deploy a VCF Workload Domain with a single NSX Manager, instead of the standard three.

Warning

Fixing missing component(s) nmlx5 during vib update

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 16:11:00 +0000

Recently while I was trying to update a new homelab server from ESXi 8 to ESXi 8 U3b using the command esxcli software vib update --depot=/vmfs/volumes/<datastore>/depot.zip, I stumbled upon the following error: Profile <> is missing component(s) ESXi,Mellanox-nmlx5.

After trying to remove the installed VIBs (that are for Mellanox cards, I do not have any) using esxcli software vib list | grep nml, and then esxicli software vib remove <vib name>, the issue still occured.

Fixing slow vService Manager

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 20:03:00 +0000

This is about an issue I encountered in my lab recently. This issue affects vCenter version 8 U2 build 22617221

If you see that cloning VMs and powering on VMs takes forever and they get stuck at 95% and 66% respectively, but eventually finishes after an hour, you can check if you are affected by this issue. Go to the task once it's finished, and check if this is shown in the task log: Failed to retrieve OVF environment sections for VM <VM name> from extension vService Manager. If you see that, you are affected by this issue.

Cost savings in the Lab

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 13:20:52 +0000

With power pricing getting severely out of hand (well, it has been for months now), I figured I should do my part.

Currently, my lab consists of four ESXi servers, two storage servers, one backup server and one personal tinkering server.

My ESXi cluster has always ran on about 1.5 hosts worth of redundancy. In order to save some power, what I did:

Leveraged VMware vRealize Operations Manager (or.. VMware Aria) to appropriately downsize virtual machines to the resources they actually need,
Looked at all the virtual machines again and powered off all VMs that I wasn’t using anymore, or will not use for the foreseeable future,
Decided that for the lab, I will be okay with having no host redundancy at the moment as I do not touch my lab nearly as often anymore as I used to.

For vRealize Operations Manager, part of what the product allows you to do is look whether virtual machines can be upscaled or downscaled. If a VM is short on resources, it will give a recommendation as to what it thinks it would need. The same if it has too many resources, it will tell you whereabouts you can downsize the VM to. In my case, I was able to de-allocate 24 vCPUs and 56GB of memory worth of compute

My lab Bill of Materials

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 16:52:47 +0000

Hi everyone,

For this post, we’re going to look into all the gear I have in my lab. Note that these are all links and prices that I paid for at the time.

Let’s start with compute. I will list a table here of the servers.

NOTE: This BoM is outdated and is yet to be updated pending upgrades that I'm saving up for. However since the cost is about 1800 euros this will take a while and I may have to decommission my current lab as you see below to be able to save that together within any reasonable timeframe

ESXi1:

VMware Purple Screen of Death troubleshooting for random crashes with disk errors in the homelab.

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 21:18:52 +0000

Hi everyone,

Time for a new blog post about the adventure I’ve been having for the past two days.

On June 2nd, my server, a DL380G6 started to suddenly take-off. The fans were roaring at 70%, and the temperature sensor near the PCI Riser was showing 110 C. Of course this is not supposed to happen, in this blog post, I will take you through my experience of troubleshooting this and hopefully this can help you.