Unleashing the Beast
I retired my 7-year-old WatchGuard M200 for the UniFi UDM Beast — the spec, my iperf and WAN tests, the BGP/FRR setup, and what I consolidated onto it.
James Kilby
VMware and cloud infrastructure tutorials, homelab guides, and DevOps insights
Latest posts
Automating vSphere Golden Images with Packer and GitHub Actions
Automate your Packer vSphere golden-image pipeline: build 6 Ubuntu LTS templates (22.04, 24.04, 26.04) server & desktop flavours with GitHub Actions.
Automating vSphere Power Management driven by Ansible and SemaphoreUI
Learn how to automate vSphere power management using Ansible and SemaphoreUI, scheduling ESXi host shutdowns based on Octopus Agile energy tariffs to cut costs.
Automated VCF 9 Offline Depot
One Bash script turns a fresh Ubuntu VM into a VCF 9 Offline Depot: Traefik, Nginx, basic auth, and Let's Encrypt wildcard certs via Cloudflare DNS.
My Self-Hosted AI Stack: Infrastructure Deep Dive (Part 2)
Part 2 of my self-hosted AI stack series. I cover container resource sizing, dual-network isolation via Traefik and Cloudflare Tunnels, and every database
New VMware Cloud on AWS Host: i7i.metal-24xl
We’ve expanded the VMC fleet with the new i7i (i7i.
My Self-Hosted AI Stack: Architecture Overview (Part 1)
How I built a fully self-hosted AI stack with Ollama, Open WebUI, n8n, ComfyUI, Qdrant and SearxNG on Docker Compose. Configs, costs, observability.
Free Octopus Agile Battery & Solar Calculator: 5 Batteries Tested
I am quite a heavy consumer of electricity at home.
Automating the Deployment of my Homelab AI Infrastructure
How I automated my homelab AI infrastructure with Ansible — NVIDIA vGPU passthrough, Docker, Traefik, and Semaphore for end-to-end deployment.
Using Content Libraries in VMC to deploy software faster
Using VMware Cloud on AWS Content Libraries to deploy ISOs and OVAs to new SDDCs in minutes instead of hours. Setup, layout, and a working example.
Blog Performance & SEO Improvements: Cloudflare, Privacy & More
I have spent the Christmas break making some improvements to this blog.
How to Expand Ubuntu Disk Space: LVM pvresize Step-by-Step
Step-by-step Ubuntu disk expansion with LVM: pvresize, vgextend, lvextend, resize2fs. Works after resizing the VM disk in vSphere/Hyper-V/KVM.
VMware Cloud on AWS Time Sync & NTP Configuration
How to configure Time Sync and NTP in VMware Cloud on AWS using the Amazon Time Sync Service — setup, firewall rules, and troubleshooting tips.
vSAN Cluster Shutdown – Orchestration
As can be seen on my Lab Overview page. I have a GPU/Management cluster that is usually running 24x7.
How I upgraded my blog as a Static Website with GitHub Actions and Cloudflare
How I deploy my blog as a static site using GitHub Actions and Cloudflare — the WordPress API, build pipeline, Slack notifications, and comments setup.
Managing my Homelab with SemaphoreUI
How I use SemaphoreUI as the web frontend for Ansible, Terraform and PowerShell in my homelab. Setup, screenshots, lessons learned in production use.
An in-depth look at VMware Cloud on AWS hosts
A full side-by-side comparison of every VMware Cloud on AWS host type — I3.metal, I3en.metal and I4i.metal — covering CPU, memory, storage and networking specs.
VMware Cloud on AWS Storage Sizing Quick Reference Guide
VMware Cloud on AWS storage sizing reference: usable TiB by host count for i3i, i3en, and i4i, plus the FTT/RAID policy used at each cluster size.
Warp – The intelligent terminal
Warp is helping me run my homelab.
How I Migrated from Pocket to Hoarder with AI Integration
How I migrated my saved articles from Pocket to Hoarder (now Karakeep), self-hosted it with Docker, and added AI tagging to organise everything.