Kevin's Ramblings

(Not) Home Lab Setup

November 4, 2016 by Kevin

Everyone in the #vDM30in30 challenge seems to be spouting off about their home labs. Before I moved to Austin, I had a home lab. It was a half-rack on the floor with 3 servers and two mass storage arrays coupled with a wiring cabinet on the wall with a cable modem, firewall, router, and switch. … Read more

Scripting SolarWinds VMan Deployment

November 3, 2016 by Kevin

Virtualization Manager 7 has just been released – Analyze the Past, Fix the Present, Prepare for the Future

It’s pretty epic with some great new features, but I’m going to concentrate on the deployment of the virtual appliance (vApp) itself.

Zen and the Art of Monitoring

November 2, 2016 by Kevin

I’ve been thinking recently about complete stack monitoring and how a good solution should be like a teenager – it can primarily take care of itself, but occasionally needs to have someone step in and give it direction.

Challenge Accepted

November 1, 2016 by Kevin

The November Post-A-Day challenge (better known as #vDM30in30) has begun and I’m going to commit to making a post a day. I’ll be honest, I don’t know too much about the Virtual Design Management, but I do love a challenge – specifically this challenge.

How I Build an Orion Server

December 21, 2020October 30, 2016 by Kevin

UPDATE: There’s an updated version of this post now available for scripters.

I’ve posted several times about how I personally build my SolarWinds Orion Servers. For this post, I’ll just discuss how I setup a Main Polling Engine on a Windows 2012 R2 Server.

SolarWinds Database on SQL Server for Linux

November 1, 2016August 28, 2016 by Kevin

This post is some of my experiences with getting the SolarWinds Orion database running on a SQL Server hosted on a Linux-native system.

Amateur TV Repairs

May 10, 2016 by Kevin

As many of you know, the missus and I have recently moved. When we finally got the TV setup in the bedroom, we found an error on the screen.

Converting Linux VHD’s to VHDx

November 19, 2020April 26, 2016 by Kevin

Virtual Hard Drives are the nuts and bolts of Virtualized Servers. This includes Linux Servers, but converting the hard drives provided some interesting findings.

After reading a bunch of the Microsoft documents about running Hyper-V for performance, there’s a big push to move all machines From Generation 1 to Generation 2 and Hard Drives to the VHDX Format.

Building my Orion Lab (Differencing Disks)

April 29, 2016April 25, 2016 by Kevin

So, I made a quick edit on the script that I used in this post to use Differencing Disks.

Building My Orion Lab

April 25, 2016 by Kevin

So, I normally need to build a Lab for my SolarWinds Orion. If I’m doing this on my own machine and don’t have the luxury of a Windows Deployment Server (WDS), and I’ve built a custom hard drive for my Windows Servers, then I use a PowerShell script to do this work for me. (Seeing a pattern here?)