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.
Field notes from a homelab that costs
real money to run.
jameskilby@blog ~ % cat blog.stats live
posts.count.............72
words.total............45k
last_post..........47d ago
categories..............34
tags...................125
vexpert.years...........11
deploys.month...........39
last_deploy..........today
lighthouse...............—
$_
AnsibleAutomation
Automating vSphere Power Management driven by Ansible and SemaphoreUI
In this post I’ll walk through how I use vSphere Power Management driven by Ansible and SemaphoreUI to automatically reduce ESXi host electricity consumption — saving real money on my Octopus Agile tariff by toggling hosts between Low Power and Balanced policies. Introduction One of the larger costs of running my homelab is the electricity….
- Artificial Intelligence | Automation | Docker | Homelab | NVIDIA | Traefik | VMware
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 powering the stack — PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Qdrant, MinIO, MongoDB, SQLite, Prometheus, and Jaeger — plus the backup strategy for each.
New VMware Cloud on AWS Host: i7i.metal-24xl
We’ve expanded the VMC fleet with the new i7i (i7i.
- Artificial Intelligence | Automation | Docker | Homelab | NVIDIA | Traefik | VMware
My Self-Hosted AI Stack: Architecture Overview (Part 1)
A walkthrough of my self-hosted AI stack: Ollama, Open WebUI, ComfyUI, Whishper, n8n, Qdrant, SearxNG, and a full observability layer — all running on my own hardware with Docker Compose.
Free Octopus Agile Battery & Solar Calculator: 5 Batteries Tested
I am quite a heavy consumer of electricity at home. This is primarily driven by my lab but having a young son and two golden retrievers means more washing and drying.
- Ansible | Artificial Intelligence | Containers | Devops | Homelab | NVIDIA | Traefik | VMware
Automating the Deployment of my Homelab AI Infrastructure
Learn how to use Ansible to configure an Ubuntu VM for use with NVIDIA based AI workloads in vSphere
Using Content Libraries in VMC to deploy software faster
How to leverage Content Libraries to deploy into VMware Cloud on AWS faster.
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
How to expand disks from the command line in Ubuntu. This is something I do fairly frequently, and I can never remember the steps.
VMware Cloud on AWS Time Sync & NTP Configuration
How to use the Amazon Time Sync Service in a VMC environment
vSAN Cluster Shutdown – Orchestration
How to safely shut down a vSAN Environment
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