ESXi – Somewhere Out There

Homelab Chronicles 13: A Year in Review

As I said in my last post, I recently moved. Which mean that all the work I did in my last apartment is gone. That was mostly physical infrastructure work, particularly the cabling. So now I get to do it again; joy!

But before I get into the new place, I should visit some topics from the past. An update of sorts. Just because I haven’t posted in a year doesn’t mean the homelab has sat untouched for a year.

UPS Delivered!

Back in April, I finally bit the bullet. I bought a “CyberPower PFC Sinewave Series CP1000PFCLCD – UPS – 600-watt – 1000 VA.” I wanted something that would communicate with ESXi to initiate a “semi-graceful” auto-shutdown if wall power was lost.

*PowerPanel dashboard, showing the UPS status as normal and full charged.*

I say “semi-graceful” since with my setup, I only have ~17min of battery life. That covers three devices: my server, my Unifi Secure Gateway (USG), and a 5-port Unifi Flex-mini Switch.

Via the accompanying PowerPanel software, I can monitor battery status, while also configuring the shutdown behavior in for ESXi. I actually have PowerPanel installed as a separate VM in ESXi. Probably not the best idea, but it works.

Back to the semi-graceful shutdown, VMs sometimes take time to properly shutdown, especially Windows Server. So between ESXi and PowerPanel, I give some time for the VMs to gracefully shutdown. But if they don’t shutdown in time, then ungraceful shutdown of VMs occur, before ESXi gracefully powers down.

Took a bit of testing to get it all figured out, but it does work. At my last apartment, there were a couple of brief blackouts or brownouts. The UPS did exactly what it needed to do.

My (Home) Assistant Quit on Me

The very last post of 2023 was me futzing around with Home Assistant. I had a “concept of a plan” to automate some of my smart home devices.

After getting it installed, though, I didn’t really do much more with it. Stupid, I know.

Unfortunately, at some point towards the end of 2023 or beginning of 2024, the HAOS VM bit the dust.

*“Failed to power on virtual machine…File system specific implementation of LookupAndOpen[file] failed.”*

I don’t exactly know what happened, or when it happened. But I know there was a power outage one night. A storm, I think. Before I had my UPS…

I can’t say for certain the power outage was the reason. After all, it was at least a couple weeks later that I realized HAOS wasn’t turned on. When I tried turning it back on, I got that message, and have ever since.

I did look into this error message a little bit. But I think reinstalling HAOS is the better choice. Especially since I didn’t do any further setup anyway.

Glad I have the UPS now 🙂

Playing with Proxmox

Over the last year or two, the big news in the virtualization space is VMWare selling out to Broadcom. And Broadcom absolutely trying to squeeze out every last penny in licensing. Recently, AT&T disclosed that Broadcom was seeking a 1050% price increase on licensing.

I’m still using ESXi/vSphere 6.5 U3 on older than 10yrs old server. Which is fine, but at some point I’ll need to replace the hardware and software. Unfortunately, there are no more perpetual, free licenses for non-commercial purposes. I never even got a 7.0 license.

With that in mind, I thought it’d be interesting to play with Proxmox, which is a FOSS virtualization platform. As such, I installed it on another server I had lying around. Unlike ESXi, Proxmox is nowhere near as user friendly. And the documentation that’s available is pretty poor, in my opinion.

That’s one of the reasons FOSS sometimes annoys me: it’s often not very accessible to anyone who’s not already an expert. But that’s a topic for another post.

The first thing I wanted to do was connect my current NFS-based OS ISOs storage to Proxmox. This way, I wouldn’t have to use extra drive space on the new Proxmox server by copying over an ISO. If the data exists on the network, use it! This NFS share is hosted on my primary Windows Server VM.

I was able to point Proxmox to the NFS. However, Proxmox wanted to use its own directory structure within that NFS. I found that rather annoying. This wouldn’t be where the Proxmox VMs live, after all. It’s simply where the ISOs are. Why should I have to rearrange the directory structure and files just for Proxmox?

I honestly don’t remember if I created a VM after all that. I don’t remember if it worked or not. But given the situation with VMWare, that won’t be the last time I play with Proxmox.

Let’s Get Physical, Physical (Again)

The last thing to report is minor, but worth mentioning. I ended up adding two more Ethernet runs. The important one being from one room to another, underneath the carpet and along the baseboards. Ah, the joys of apartment living.

Anyway, that’s not that big of a deal. I had already done it once, after all.

Rather, it was the idea that led to this. In my old apartment, the Google Fiber jack (ONT) was in the living room. The guest room down the hall served as the “server closet.” The server, Unifi AP, main switch, UPS, and other devices were in the guest room. But the Unifi Secure Gateway (USG) was in the living room, since the Internet point of entry was there. Which seemed strange to me. I wanted all the main gear in the guest room.

It’s hard to explain without a map or diagram, so I’ll use some. This is the diagram of my original layout:

*My original setup at my last apartment. Simple, if not a bit overkill.*

To move the USG to the guest bedroom, there were two ways to achieve this. One was by adding a second run from the living room to the guest bedroom. One run would connect the fiber jack to the WAN side of the USG. The other run would connect from the LAN side of the USG back to the switch in the living room.

But I wondered if it was possible to do this:

*Note that the USG doesn’t have that many ports; I forgot to add a second switch in that room, but the idea still stands*.

Essentially, could a WAN connection go through a VLAN? Because if it could, I wouldn’t have to run another cable. I looked it up and even asked on reddit. And the answer was yes, this is entirely possible and not that unusual!

Unfortunately, when I tried to do this, it didn’t work. It even caused me some more issues with the Unifi controller being inaccessible while it wasn’t working.

In the end, I just laid a second down a second Ethernet run. Maybe I gave up too quickly, but sometimes the easiest solution…is simply the easiest solution 🤷‍♂️

So that was last year in the life of the homelab. Not as much as I wanted to do, but it was at least something. And that’s the point, right? To at least play around with it and learn something.

Homelab Chronicles 12: I Need a Home Assistant

Homelab

I’m lazy. To the point where I don’t even want to get up to turn off the lights. Thank god for Internet-enabled home automation.

I started with smart plugs — which I’ve had for several years now — then expanded to Google Nest devices (“Hey Google, turn off my lights!”), smart bulbs, and an Ecobee thermostat. I even have an indoor security camera, but that’s not really a part of my automation. Still an IoT device though. Anyway, these are all different brands: Google, TP-Link Kasa, Ecobee, Tuya, etc. Luckily, home automation has evolved to be pretty open. As in, I can control everything from Google Home on my phone. I have the separate apps for each brand, but I do tend to mainly use Google Home. It works great; only the security camera still needs its native app for me to view the live feed or recordings.

Though with the continuing and increasing rate of “enshittification of the Internet,” I thought it might be a good idea to ensure that my home devices don’t have to rely on the “goodwill” of these companies and their clouds. Just because controlling my smart plugs from anywhere in the world is free today, doesn’t mean it can’t be a paid subscription tomorrow. Looking at you, BMW, and your heated seat subscription.

Enter Home Assistant. I’d been hearing about Home Assistant for some time now, on reddit, Lemmy, Tildes, etc. I also have a couple of friends who use it, too. So I thought I’d finally give it a try.

I’ll probably break this up into a few parts, since this will be an on-going project to get everything working properly and the way I want. Home Assistant can be a very powerful automation hub, but it’ll likely require a lot of configuration and tinkering. I need a plan.

The Plan

Install Home Assistant. Find out what the hardware requirements are and what I can run it on. I have a server (or three…though only one is ever running) plus many other spare or backup computers lying around. So I have options.
Add all or as many of my IoT devices that I can. Some basic research shows that all the brands I use have integrations with Home Assistant.
See what can be controlled locally. Hopefully everything! If I lose my Internet connection or the cloud is no longer free, will I still be able to control my devices? Right now, that’s not the case with all my devices. That’s the main reason I want Home Assistant: local control.
Create the automations. My automations are simple: lights, via the smart plugs, turn on and off at certain times. My Ecobee thermostat has standard programming options of if temperature hits X, then do Y. But maybe there are more advanced things I want my devices to do. I’ll find out what’s possible.
Remotely access and control Home Assistant from wherever I am, so long as I have Internet access. I can do that now via Google Home and the various native apps. Can I do this with Home Assistant, given that it’s installed locally? How can I do this securely? While my thermostat and camera are what I mess with the most when I’m out and about, I do sometimes turn lights on and off. This is especially true when I’m out of town.

The Installation

This did not go smoothly. Home Assistant — I’m going to use HA or HAOS from here on out — has many guides on installing the system, with several different routes one could take. Which is great, but I also feel like the guides aren’t as complete as they should be and are inconsistent.

I initially wanted to install HA on my Ubuntu Server VM. It’s getting a bit loaded up with stuff — the Unifi Controller, DDNS stuff, Docker, and Wireguard — but thought it’d be fine. However, I quickly realized that HA is mainly a standalone OS. There are other versions, but HAOS is the recommended one.

*Chart on their installation page showing the different versions/methods available.*

OK, no problem. I can install it on a NUC I have lying around. Or better yet, I have ESXi on my server; just a matter of creating a new VM. This is where it started getting confusing. Rather than just showing me an ISO, there was an option for installing on a Generic X86-64 bit machine. That’s what I wanted right? A VM is just that; just not physical.

Attempt 1: Generic X86-64

I downloaded the specified img.xz file, extracted the IMG file with 7-ZIP, uploaded it to my ISOs datastore in ESXi, and then created the VM. One important thing was to make sure the VM loads with EFI instead of BIOS. After setting it to EFI, I loaded the IMG in the virtual “CD Drive.” I’ve done this several times, to install Windows/Windows Server or Ubuntu as VMs.

Except that didn’t work. It was like booting without boot media. Nothing happened. The instructions were for a bare metal installation, burning the IMG on to a USB stick using something like Balena Etcher. Since this was a VM, I skipped all that. There’s no “virtual USB stick” needed here; that’s what the IMG file is. I tried a couple more times from scratch, deleting the VM and then recreating it, and it still didn’t work. I even tried mounting the IMG on my local machine; wouldn’t mount. I wasn’t sure what was going on there.

Attempt 2: Using an OVA/OVF in ESXi

Undaunted, I tried a different method. One of alternative methods. Hey, it even mentions ESXi here! Wish I’d seen that beforehand. I downloaded the OVA file (never used one of these) and then used the option in ESXi to “Deploy a virtual machine from an OVF or OVA file.” I selected the OVA file I downloaded and it was uploaded to ESXi. It was successfully created and I started the new VM.

It booted properly and began loading up. All was looking good, until I started seeing some warnings and errors. They were similar to this. And it just kept looping. I tried rebooting the VM a few times, but it kept giving the same error. It never got to completion.

After deleting the VM, trying again with the OVA file a few times, but getting the same error, I was getting very frustrated. This was still only the installation!

Attempt 3: Using a VMDK in ESXi

Finally, I found a guide on the HA forums on how to install HAOS on ESXI 6.7 (I have 6.5, but the versions are basically the same). This one references a VMDK file! I’m more familiar with those. I did eventually find where to get a VMDK under the Windows or Linux install instructions. I guess for those two platforms, the idea is to be running HAOS in VMware Workstation. Why a VMDK isn’t also linked in the alternative methods guide, I don’t know. Or more importantly, why isn’t this forum post part of the official methods?

Either way, it finally booted to completion, and the lovely HAOS “banner” showed in the VM’s virtual console.

It took me 2 hours to successfully install and boot the OS. But now that part was done! Now I could start Onboarding with HAOS.

Delayed (On)boarding

I quickly typed in the the .local address into my browser, to get to the Web UI. After fiddling with some browser settings (I had a browser-based VPN option enabled for “securing” non-HTTP sites, which I had to turn off), the page loaded!

Except the system was still “preparing” and could “take up to 20 minutes.”

What? What kind of preparation takes 20 minutes? OK, whatever. I left it up on another screen while I went back to whatever else I was doing. After at least 20 minutes of still seeing this screen, I was getting worried again. Luckily, clicking that blue dot showed a log.

This is what I found, repeated over and over:

23-09-30 02:49:30 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.misc.tasks] Home Assistant watchdog reanimation failed!
23-09-30 02:51:30 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.misc.tasks] Watchdog miss API response from Home Assistant

A quick Google Search led me to a GitHub issue where others had been reporting a similar problem. Luckily, it was a fairly recent post; the initial issue was reported only 3 weeks ago (at the time of this writing).

There were a couple potential solutions there, including trying to install HAOS 10.4 — I was using 10.5 — and then updating. But one that seemed to take the least effort was to simply…wait it out. A few people mentioned that after waiting a bit, the system eventually did what it needed to do and would be ready for input. For some, it took 15 minutes, while others waited hours.

One project contributor even mentioned what was going on:

tl;dr: The errors are a bug in Supervisor, but download should continue despite the errors. Usually you just have to be patient while Home Assistant OS downloads the latest version of Home Assistant Core (which is around 1.8GB at the time of writing).

The details:

When first starting Home Assistant OS, the Supervisor downloads the latest version of Home Assistant Core. During that time, a small replacement for Core called landing page is running. It seems that the Supervisor does API checks for this small version of Core as well, leading to this messages:
23-09-26 10:33:48 WARNING (MainThread) [supervisor.misc.tasks] Watchdog miss API response from Home Assistant
23-09-26 10:35:48 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.misc.tasks] Watchdog found a problem with Home Assistant API!
23-09-26 10:35:48 ERROR (MainThread) [supervisor.misc.tasks] Home Assistant watchdog reanimation failed!
At first, a warning appears, 2 minutes later the first error appears. Both messages should not appear while the landing page is running, this is a bug in Supervisor.

If the download completes within 2 minutes, then non of this errors are visible. So this requires a somewhat slower Internet connection to show up.
Source: Agners on GitHub

While I was doubtful that this was some slow download issue — I have a gigabit Internet connection — I was frustrated and tired. It was already nearly 3:00am, and I really didn’t want to have to throw out this installation and try again or try HAOS 10.4. So I waited.

I didn’t go to bed; I was playing Final Fantasy XIV during all of this. But about 2 hours later, it finally did complete whatever it was doing, and I was prompted to create my smart home. I guess it was a slow download issue, probably on the other end.

Stage Completed

It was around 5:00am when I finally called it quits. I had been working on installing HAOS for at least 5 hours. Which I found to be a ridiculous amount of time and effort to do something that’s typically fast and simple. I have things to say about that, but that’ll be for another post, another day.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I felt like the official instructions were pretty mediocre. They weren’t necessarily wrong, but rather lacking in details and information. Because of that, it led me down erroneous pathways that were wastes of time. Thank goodness for other users.

If you encounter any issues, the official forums, GitHub, and the official Discord server are very informative and filled with helpful people. Past reddit posts also provided some decent help or at least pointers. So far, I’ve been able to find the help that I needed. Not all projects or systems can say that, even with large userbases.

Anyway, Home Assistant OS is now installed, running, and waiting for me. The next step is to add all my devices, which will be in the next entry.

Homelab Chronicles 05: Dead Disk Drive

Homelab

Sometime around the new year, one of the drives in my server appeared to have died. I had some issues with it in the past, but usually unseating and reseating it seemed to fix whatever problems it was presenting. But not this time.

My server has 7 500GB HDDs, set-up in a RAID 5 configuration. It gives me about 2.7TB of storage space. These are just consumer-level WD Blue 7200rpm drives. It’s a Homelab that’s mainly experimental; I’m not into spending big money on it. Not yet, anyway.

While I’ve since heard that RAID 5 isn’t great, I’m OK with this since this is just a Homelab. Anyway, in RAID5, one drive can die and the array will still function. Which is exactly what happened here.

However, I began tempting fate by not immediately swapping the failed drive. I didn’t have any spares at home, but more importantly, I was being cheap. So I let it run in a degraded state for a month or two months. This was very dangerous as I don’t backup the VMs or ESXi. I only backup my main Windows Server instance via Windows Server backup to an external HDD. Even then, I’ve committed the common cardinal sin of backups: I’ve yet to test a single WS backup. So using something like Veeam is probably worth looking into for backing up full VMs. And of course testing my Windows Server full bare-metal backups.

Luckily, fates were on my side and no other drive failures were reported. I finally got around to replacing the drive about month ago. Got my hands on a similar WD Blue 500GB drive; a used one at that. It was pretty straightforward. I swapped the drives, went into the RAID configuration in the system BIOS, designated the drive as part of the array, and then had it rebuild. I think it took at least 10hrs.

While it was rebuilding, everything else was down. All VMs were down, because ESXi was down. Thought it best to rebuild while nothing else was happening. Who knows how long it would’ve taken otherwise and if I’d run into other issues. I wonder how this is done on real-life production servers.

Afterwards, the RAID controller reported that everything was in tip-top shape.

But of course, I wanted more. More storage, that is. I ended up getting two of the 500GB WD Blue HDDs: one for the replacement and the other as an additional disk to the array.

Unfortunately, Dell does not make it easy to add additional drives to an existing array. I couldn’t do it directly on the RAID controller (pressing Ctrl+R during boot), nor in Dell’s GUI-based BIOS or Lifecycle Controller. IDRAC didn’t allow it either.

Looking around online, it seemed that the only way to do it would be via something called OpenManage, some kind of remote system controller from Dell. But I couldn’t get it to work no matter what I did. The instructions on what I needed to install, how to install it once I figured out what to install, nor how to actually use it once I determined how to install it, were poor. Thanks, Dell.

In the end, after spending at least a few hours researching and experimenting, it didn’t seem worth it for 500GB more of storage space. I did add the 8th drive in, but as a hot spare. I may even take it out and use it as cold spare.

But yeah, I can now say that I’ve dealt with a failed drive in a RAID configuration. Hopefully it never goes further than that.

Homelab Chronicles 01 – The Beginning, Sorta

Homelab

So this is a new thing I want to try. It’s been over a year since I’ve posted, so why not?

Over the last 12-18mo, I’ve had the opportunity to set up a Homelab. I worked at an MSP for almost a year and a half and got a bunch of old client equipment, including a couple Dell servers.

My lab isn’t really segregated from the main network, but that’s because of what I’m trying to do; I’ll explain soon. But before I get to that, here’s the main gear I’ve been playing with:

Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway (USG)
Cisco SG200-26 Managed Switch (24 port)
Ubiquiti U6-Lite AP
TP-Link TL-SG108E Managed Switch (8 port)
Dell PowerEdge T620

I also have a bunch of other gear, like a Dell PowerEdge R610 and another 16- or 24-port switch that are sitting around collecting dust. At one point, however, I was playing with Unraid on the R610. Also had a desktop PC that had pfSense or OPNsense functioning as my router/firewall, before getting the USG. I don’t know enough about firewalls to really use those though.

Anyway, here’s a crappy diagram of the network.

Things in red are the main devices. Not all devices shown; I think I have like 10 physical computers, though not all used regularly. And there a bunch of other WiFi and IoT devices. I included some of the extra devices like the PS4 and iPhone so it doesn’t look like I just have these extra network switches for no reason. I live in a 2-Bdr, 900 sq. ft. apartment, but the extra switches are so I don’t have 3+ cables running to a room that I’m tripping over (thank god for gaffing tape).

Initially, I was going to have a separate lab subnet and VLAN. And I started it that way. But I’m one of those that if I don’t have a real “goal,” it’s hard for me to just play around with things. I need an actual project to work on. It wasn’t enough to have a separate, clean sandbox. I wanted the sandbox that already had all the toys in it! So I’ve already redone the network environment once.

In the end, I decided that I’d create a Windows Active Directory Domain environment for home. I want to have a domain account that I use across my computers. Ideally, I’d have folder redirection, offline folders, and maybe even roaming profiles, so that any computer I use will have my files. The server(s) will also function as a fileserver, with network shares shared out to accounts via Group Policy.

On the network side, some of my goals are:

Stand up a VPN service, probably using WireGuard
Create a management VLAN and another for everything else
Set up conditional DNS forwarding
Replace the switches with Ubiquiti gear to really take advantage of the Unifi software

I could go on, but what I’m trying to emulate at home is a small business environment, from the bottom to the top, from the router all the way to the workstation. I work for a small biz, so this is the perfect place for me to mess around with and screw things up before I try on my employer’s live environment.

All in all, this is a great learning experience and I’m excited to share what I’m doing. Maybe this will help others who are trying to build their own Homelabs.

I know I’ll be screwing things up along the way – and I can’t wait to do so!