Proxmox

Proxmox - Tired of deploying from ISO? Upload VM image

Recently, I had to replace my homelab VMware ESXi server… we all know why. After considering the many open-source options available, I decided on Proxmox due to its similarities with ESXi. Don’t get me wrong—I love OpenStack, but for a single server setup, it felt like too

Docker

OpenStack / Cloud-init - Deploy Docker Ubuntu VM in under 2 minutes

In this guide, I’ll show you how to deploy a fully configured Ubuntu VM with Docker using cloud-init in OpenStack. With this setup, you’ll have Docker up and running in just under two minutes! Prerequisites Before we begin, make sure you have the following ready: * Access to

K3S

Upgrade or Downgrade K3s

This will be a very short but helpful post. I use k3s on my VPS server because it is a very stable and simple K8s distribution. Upgrading is also very easy. To upgrade to the latest stable release I simply run the command I originally used to install K3s. curl

Nextcloud

Deploying Nextcloud in K8s using HELM

A friend recently wanted to give me photos that he had taken at a party. Copying them to an old usb stick just took too long and so I offered to send him a link where he could upload the pictures. Yes, there are numerous online services that could be

Ceph

Cleaning Up My Ceph Cluster with OSD Backfillfull: A Journey to Optimal Performance

Managing a Ceph cluster can be a complex yet rewarding experience. Recently, I encountered an issue with OSD (Object Storage Daemon) backfillfull, which required immediate attention to ensure the smooth operation of my storage infrastructure. In this blog post, I'll share the steps I took to resolve the

OpenStack Magnum

Deploy Kubernetes Clusters in OpenStack within minutes with Magnum

Now that we have set up our cool and high available OpenStack cloud, it is time to try out the various services that you can provide to your end users in OpenStack. Today we will take a look at Magnum. From the official OpenStack Magnum website: Magnum is an OpenStack

Plausible

Deploy Plausible Analytics in Kubernetes

Plausible is a GDPR, CCPA and cookie law compliant Google Analytics alternative, that can help you analyse traffic on your web services. They offer a paid service but there is also the option to run a Self-Hosted installation. Unfortunately they don't offer an official Helm Chart (yet)

Kolla-Ansible

Kolla-Ansible OpenStack 2023.2 released - How to upgrade

Beginning of December Kolla-Ansible released their support for OpenStack 2023. (Bobcat). Most notable changes (to me) are: * RabbitMQ quorum queues * These are now enabled by default and I highly recommend using them. Without it you will run into problems if your control node goes down that currently holds the

OpenStack Magnum

OpenStack Magnum Kubernetes VEXXHOST Cluster API driver in Kolla-Ansible

Update 27.12.2023 With the release of Kolla-Ansible OpenStack 2023.2 (Bobcat), the CAPI driver is now already included in Magnum. While the Magnum docs are not yet updated, the release notes state this: Adds support for copying in {{ node_custom_config }}/magnum/kubeconfig to Magnum containers for

Terraform

Update: Deploying OpenStack with Kolla-Ansible on VMware ESXi using Terraform

It's been quite a while since my last post as I had a lot of stuff to do at my workplace and besides that I studied for VMware VCP-DCV 2023 certification. The learning paid off and I received certification. :) But finally I found some time to enhance

Velero

Velero backup to TrueNAS S3 with free Let's Encrypt certificate

In one of my previous blogposts, I explained how to install and configure Velero with TrueNAS as an S3 storage backend. My whole blogpost was focused on running everything on the local network. Since I have my K8s cluster running on a VPS I needed to find a way to

Kolla-Ansible

Kolla-Ansible Cinder Containers unhealthy

I recently replaced all 3 control nodes in my OpenStack cluster and once I replaced the last control node, all of a sudden three of the four Cinder containers became unhealty. Looking at the logs of the cinder_api container revealed the following error: 2023-05-30 21:31:36.

Kolla-Ansible

Kolla-Ansible upgrade from Yoga to Zed

Since there still seems to be no official guide on how to upgrade from OpenStack release Yoga to Zed with Kolla-Ansible, I have put together the steps that I used to successfully upgrade. I hit a few problems here and there but finally managed to get it working. My

Terraform

Deploying VMs in Virtualbox using Terraform Provider terrafarm/virtualbox

Today I simply wanted to deploy 1-2 VMs in virtualbox using the Terraform provider terrafarm/virtualbox. What should have been very easy turned out to take me around 15-20 minutes to get it finally working. Here is what I had to do on my Windows 10 machine to

OpenStack Magnum

OpenStack Magnum insecure registry

It is very convenient to use a local docker registry when deploying Kubernetes clusters using Magnum in OpenStack. Especially if you like me try to deploy multiple clusters to test several settings. It is just way faster to pull the images from the local network instead of the internet. In

OpenStack Zun

Kolla-Ansible Zun (Container Service) deployment fails

Update: Looks like the problem has now also been detected by the kolla-ansible team. There is a bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/zun/+bug/2007142 and they have updated the ZUN kolla-ansible documentation https://docs.openstack.org/kolla-ansible/yoga/reference/compute/zun-guide.html with a

Kolla-Ansible

Deploying OpenStack with Kolla-Ansible on VMware ESXi using Terraform

If you did read one of my very first blog posts about the deployment of OpenStack in my homelab you might want to have a look at this new article, where I will do the same but instead of using Vagrant I will use Terraform. And if you wonder why

TrueNas

Failed to replace a failed disk in TrueNAS Scale - device busy

Yes, hard disks do break from time to time. But thanks to ZFS and RAIDZ-1, there is no reason to panic. Or is there? Interestingly the disk was not reported by ZFS to be broken but there was a message in the WebUI indicating that something is wrong. So

Velero

Kubernetes Backup with Velero

As soon as you have set up your Kubernetes cluster and deployed a few containers, the question arises how to create backups. A very useful and comfortable tool for this is Velero. It can be easily installed via HELM and you can create backups and restores by a two single

Vagrant

Building a more advanced homelab setup with a dedicated server running VMware ESXi

This article builds on my previous article "Building a minmal homelab on Windows with Virtualbox and Vagrant within minutes". Especially for larger deployments, such as a multinode OpenStack or Kubernetes cluster, the small homelab setup with Virtualbox quickly reaches its limits. In this case, it makes sense to

TrueNas

How to incredibly increase TrueNAS VM NIC throughput

I recently replaced my favourite OmniOS VM in my HomeLab with TrueNAS Core. Main reason for this was that I wanted to play around with the very cool VAAI features available in TrueNAS Core. I used VAAI ages ago with a NetApp system and I really liked the fact that

VirtualBox

Building a minmal homelab on Windows with Virtualbox and Vagrant within minutes

18 Dec 2022 • 4 min read If you want to build a flexible and inexpensive homelab and don't want to invest money in an additional server for the time being, then I can only recommend you to use a combination of Oracle Virtualbox and HashiCorp Vagrant. Both tools

TrueNas

How to install and setup TrueNAS Scale or how I replaced my two old Odroid HC2 by a single Odroid H2

It was finally time to replace my two old Odroid HC2s with something newer. I had them both running with a 3.5 inch 2TB hard drive each and they ran really well for a long time. But what never really worked well was ZFS. Who does not know ZFS,

Kolla-Ansible

Deploying OpenStack with Kolla-Ansible

UPDATE Please see my new article for a much simpler and easier method that explains how to achieve the same using Terraform. Would you like to set up a complete OpenStack cluster? Then you can easily do this with Kolla-Ansible. Kolla-Ansible is based on Ansible, as the name

News

Welcome

Welcome to my "new" blog. Yes, you read correctly "new" blog. I had already started a blog on a very well-known blogging platform, but the totally outdated UI and usability really kept giving me problems. Fortunately, I recently got myself a very cheap VPS and