September 10, 2019 Hardware

Nested virtualization: VMware ESXi vs. Microsoft Hyper-V

Some time ago, I published articles on setting up a home lab using a PC running ESXi and Workstation. We all know that nested virtualization is not an ESXi-only feature; Microsoft Hyper-V also enables us to run VMs inside its VMs. Microsoft’s implementation of this technology is a bit different, but it exists. And, considering that VMware and Microsoft have been competing for a long time, it’s interesting to see what each has to offer for this type of virtualization. In this post, I examine how easy it is to configure a nested virtualization layer inside Hyper-V and vSphere VMs and discuss peculiarities of this process in both environments.

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August 30, 2019 Hardware

How VMware has covered performance gap between physical and virtual GPUs

Once engineers came up with the way to virtualize graphics processing units (GPUs), the new era started for machine learning, gaming, modeling, and whatever else IOPS-hungry: all these applications can now go cloud! In this article, I’d like to take a closer look at why GPU virtualization is so promising, who pioneers this tech, and how VMware managed to cover the gap between the virtual and bare-metal GPUs.

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August 14, 2019 Hardware

Shopping for HDDs? My notes on how to do it right

It goes without saying that hard disk drives (HDDs) are one of the most common storage medium to date. Data centers, home labs, and PCs have them inside. No wonders, HDDs offer unmatched capacity for moderate costs per GB. Let’s take a closer look at how to choose an HDD. This article is going to be pretty much a long read, but there’s a flow chart in the end that helps to make your choice.
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December 24, 2018 Hardware

How to build a home lab using your PC. Part 1: ESXi 6.7 U1

While writing my previous article, I remembered the days when I was only building my first lab. It was a bit tough, you know, as vSphere yet was a black box for me. Those thoughts brought me to the idea of writing this article. The article in which I share my know-how of building a minimalistic lab using… only a PC, switch, and laptop. I’ve divided this topic into 2 parts as I am unsure whether you guys like long-reads. In this part, I discuss how to build an ESXi environment using PC and ESXi 6.7 U1. The next article addresses creating a lab using PC and VMware Workstation 15 Pro. I hope that both of them will be really handy for you!

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March 7, 2018 Hardware

Shopping for SSDs? Here are several tips to help you make a right choice

These days, if you ask any system administrator something like “what should I do to boost the performance of my I/O-hungry applications?” probably, the most common answer will be “go and get some SSDs”. No wonder, as flash memory becomes more and more affordable while delivering benefits that in the majority of cases outweigh Hard Disk Drives, such as significantly higher performance and better reliability. However, when choosing SSDs, you have to keep a few things in mind since performance, durability, and price vary from model to model.

So what should you ask yourself or a vendor when choosing SSDs?

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