Blah, Cloud

Latest posts

Fixing High Bandwidth Serial in Wine

(or: I just wanted my motion rig to work on Linux)

Jan 22, 2026

CV / Résumé

My experience, interests and background

Feb 25, 2022

Migrating from Google Workspaces to iCloud+

Google recently announced that it was getting rid of the legacy free tier for Google Apps/Workspace accounts, something I've used for 10 years, and I don't care for that. I already pay for iCloud and it allows custom domains, so let the migration begin!

Jan 25, 2022

New Blog, Who Dis?

Myles, it's been three years, where have you been mate?

Jan 18, 2022

Now then.

What I'm interested in, reading, researching or building right now.

Nov 12, 2021

Hi, I'm Myles

My experience, interests, background, what I'm interested in right now and future goals.

Oct 25, 2021

This "blog", should have been a Tweet.

As such, it is now gone. See actual good content here .

Oct 25, 2021

Works

An overview of collateral I've created, content I've built and presentations I've done.

Oct 3, 2021

ClusterAPI for vSphere, now with CNS support

Using CAPV to deploy K8s clusters with vSphere CNS

Oct 10, 2019

Using Velero for K8s Backup and Restore of CSI Volumes

How to backup and restore K8s applications on vSphere

Oct 4, 2019

First-look: Automated K8s lifecycle with ClusterAPI

Using CAPV alpha to spin up K8s clusters on vSphere

Jun 26, 2019

Using cloud-init for VM templating on vSphere

Step by step guide for using cloud-init on vSphere

Jun 9, 2019

Using the vSphere Cloud Provider for K8s to dynamically deploy volumes

How to provision Kubernetes Persistent Volumes dynamically on vSphere

Feb 8, 2019

Setting up K8s and the vSphere Cloud Provider using kubeadm

How to enable the vSphere Cloud Provider with kubeadm

Jan 28, 2019

Creating an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS cloud image for cloning on VMware

Intro I have been experimenting a lot over the past 18 months with containers and in particular, Kubernetes, and one of the core things I always seemed to get hung up on was part-zero - creating the VMs to actually run K8s. I wanted a CLI only way to build a VM template for the OS and then deploy that to the cluster. It turns out that with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (in particular the cloud image OVA) there…

Jan 27, 2019

vSAN SPBM and vCloud Director

I had a question last week from Bozo Popovic ↗ during our EMEA field SE training session on vSAN operations relating to SPBM support for service providers that use vCloud Director in their environments. Next up Mr. @mylesagray giving a #vSAN operations overview to our EMEA field at the @vmwarevsan workshop this morning pic.twitter.com/48seQc8i7d — Cormac Hogan (@CormacJHogan) November 30,…

Dec 2, 2017

Migrating vSAN vmkernel ports to a new subnet

After deploying a vSAN cluster, the need sometimes arises to make changes to its network configuration, such as migrating the vmkernel network of the cluster to a new subnet. This requirement may appear for example when changing the network in which the vSAN cluster is running, or even, in a more complex scenario such as when a standalone vSAN needs to be converted to a stretched cluster. In these…

Nov 3, 2017

vCloud Director console proxy and UI on a single interface

I was recently rebuilding part of my lab infrastructure, and as part of it, I wanted to migrate my vCD cells from two IPs each to a single IP (as this feature was added in vCD 8.10 ↗ ) for both the web UI and the console proxy. It simplifies provisioning, potential routing problems, and load-balancer configuration by having a single IP but separate ports for each service. Adding both services to a…

Aug 20, 2017

Removing orphaned IPs from NSX using REST API

I had a power outage recently that took out my entire lab in a very ungraceful manner - everything, well mostly everything, came back up without a hitch - but NSX was acting a bit weird, so I decided to redeploy the NSX Controllers. I removed all 3 controllers and tried redeploying but ended up with the error “No IPs left in pool NSX-Controllers”. If you’re familiar with NSX,…

Aug 19, 2017

Customer, Partner, Vendor.

Over the last 9 months, a lot has happened in my life; I have a nice titanium plate in my shoulder now courtesy of a major car accident. I changed roles at Novosco ↗ from Infrastructure Engineer to Cloud Technologist - focusing more on R&D and emerging platforms, and I helped out Frank Denneman ↗ and Niels Hagoort ↗ in editing their best-selling vSphere 6.5 Host Deep Dive book ↗ .

Jul 18, 2017

vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive

Over the last 6-9 months, I have been reviewing the vast majority of a new book just released to print by Frank Denneman ↗ and Niels Hagoort ↗ - The vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive ↗ . This book is, without a doubt, the most in-depth look at host design I have ever read, we are not talking about standard best practices here, though those are in there too. More, low-level understanding of why…

Jun 21, 2017

Enabling IPv6 with DHCPv6-PD and PPPoE on a Fortigate

Out of morbid curiosity (and lack of IPv4 public address space available to me), I decided I wanted to enable IPv6 in my lab. However, before taking the plunge there, I would try it out on my residential ADSL line, I use the same brand of firewall there as in my lab so the experience should be largely transferable. So for a bit of context; I have a Zen Internet ADSL line (I saw the fiber van…

Jun 18, 2017

Veeam Backup job retention PowerShell one-liner

Pulls back a table of Job name vs configured retention for Backup type jobs: Get-VBRJob | ? { $_ . jobtype -eq 'Backup' } | Select-Object -Property @ { N = 'Job Name' ; E ={ $_ . name }}, @ { N = 'Storage Retention' ; E ={ $_ . GetOptions (). BackupStorageOptions . RetainCycles }} | Format-Table -AutoSize

Apr 19, 2017

Implementing a multi-tenant networking platform with NSX

How to implement a multi-tenant network using VMware NSX-V

Mar 23, 2017

Designing a networking platform for IaaS multi-tenancy

How to architect a multi-tenant datacenter networking platform

Mar 23, 2017

Multi-tenant network challenges

Challenges that are presented around designing and operating a multi-tenant DC network

Mar 23, 2017

Recovering NSX Manager with corrupt filesystem

I had a bit of a storage outage in my lab due to a funky behaviour on the Synology that I use as primary storage for all my VMs. Most stuff came back up or could at least be trivially fixed (like VCSA, PSCs, etc) you can edit the GRUB boot string ↗ and force into /bin/bash then run fsck from there. One VM that doesn’t allow the GRUB string to be edited or both to be paused in any way is the…

Nov 13, 2016

Migrating from VCSA embedded PSC to external PSC

On a bit of a shorter note to my previous article/novella ↗ - I have been moving my lab to a bit more of an “enterprise” style architecture - deploying SRM was in the way for that, so I had the need to set up another vCenter, however this gave the opportunity to move to a multi-PSC, multi-VC architecture. There is quite some complexity in my lab with regard to vCenter and its…

Oct 30, 2016

Designing a modern multi-tenant DC network

Thought processes for designing a highly scalable datacenter network

Oct 27, 2016

My VCIX6-NV exam experience

Overview of the challenges I had with the VCIX NV exam

Sep 23, 2016

My home datacenter.

I have been meaning to write this for a very long time, finally inspired by seeing Russell Pope’s absolutely insane lab in the vExpert Slack ↗ and Mark Brookfield ↗ ’s homelab post ↗ it started when my lab was a single Dell R710 with 96GB RAM and 2x X5670 procs. The home lab has stopped being a lab and become a datacenter in that time and it’s about time I put it down on paper.

Sep 13, 2016

Setting up Duo 2FA for Fortigate admin authentication

How to use Duo's proxy application to enable 2FA on third party devices

Aug 31, 2016

Enabling Mini Jumbo Frames (RFC4638) on OpenReach FTTC

How to enable 1500 MTU on OpenReach internet connections

Aug 28, 2016

Replicating SAN on openSUSE with VAAI

Preamble This article was written a few years back, but never published - it was some work I was doing in my lab to try and get to grips around the work involved in creating a SAN with synchronous replication built in from scratch. It in no way should be used for production, but rather as a learning exercise - as previously stated the instructions are a few years old and version specific, so…

Aug 27, 2016

Configuring Auto Deploy Stateless Caching in vSphere 6.0

Following on from my previous post on configuring custom ESXi images for PXE deployment , it piqued my interest again in Auto Deploy, now that I have a lab large enough (enough physical failure domains) to justify auto-deploy I figured i’d give it another go. I have chosen to implement stateless caching as it will allow the hosts to boot from the last used ESXi image they had if the…

Aug 19, 2016

Building a customised ESXi image for PXE installation

Introduction I have recently been working on a larger scale platform for my employer, it requires quick deployments of environments on VSAN with some standardised VIBs added in, initially we were doing this with a standard ESXi ISO install through iDRAC and then installing vCenter, vSphere Update Manager and pushing the VIBs to the hosts via that. This is clearly a sub-optimal process and given…

Aug 9, 2016

vSphere Update Manager – Cannot Scan Host

I have been testing out Runecast Analyzer ↗ in my lab recently - it’s pretty badass, you can set it up to scan your virtual infrastructure at a vCenter level and will scan your vC, VMs and hosts looking for KBs that may apply, security compliance and best practises. As you can see my lab isn’t exactly a model config when it comes to any of these things:

May 15, 2016

LSI3108 based controllers now VSAN 6.2 Certified

After a long an arduous certification and regression testing process following many problems with LSI 3108 based controllers that I have been using for VSAN they are finally VSAN 6.2 certified. Having seen and opened multiple tickets about strange controller behaviors (hot add controller do VMware have released a FW/HW and Software combo that, according to a highly regarded VMware internal storage…

Apr 29, 2016