Month: April 2024

Whats in my HomeLab (WIMH) – April24

Last update – Jan 21: https://wordpress.com/post/1giantnerd.wordpress.com/1024

Back in August 2022, I decided to consolidate the Dell T3500 & T5400 that I was running as a HomeLab and have a single workstation capable of running the latest ESXi versions, and enough memory and grunt to scale depending on project.

The result:

New PC Parts

Specs:

  • AMD B550 Tomahawk Motherboard
  • AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core CPU (highly recommend)
  • Be quiet! Dark Rock 4 200W CPU Cooler
  • 96GB memory
  • Storage:
    • Samsung 980 PRO 2TB NVME drive.
    • Western Digital Blue 2TB SATA drive.
    • Western Digital Blue 3.7TB SATA drive.
    • Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD
    • Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SSD.

Currently Running (Virtualised):

All sitting on VMWare ESXi 6.7

  • W2K19 Domain Controller
  • W2K19 Management Server
  • W2K19 WSUS Server
  • vCenter 6.7 server

To finish configuring:

  • SharePoint 2010 Server
  • SharePoint 2019 Server
  • Development Workstation
  • Azure DevOps Server

HomeLab Future Plans:

Converting VHDX to VMDK

Recently moving my Crypto wallet virtual machine from an older PC to a new PC – Hyper-V to VMWare Workstation. Both PCs do not have connection to each other, so using VMWare Converter tool would not work.

We will use qemu-img software to convert the image. https://cloudbase.it/qemu-img-windows/

Note: QEMU disk image utility for Windows. It is used for converting, creating, and consistency checking of various virtual disk formats. It is compatible with Hyper-V, KVM, VMware, VirtualBox, and Xen virtualization solutions.

Steps:

1.) Download the software from the above link.

2.) Extract the contents, and copy to C:\Program Files.

3.) Open Command Prompt as an Administrator and navigate to the newly extracted files – C:\Program Files\qemu-img.

4.) Lets get the information about the file we want to convert.

qemu-img.exe info “<FilePath>”
Eg. qemu-img.exe info "G:\Hyper-V\Crypto\Virtual Hard Disks\Crypto.vhdx"

5.) Run the following command to convert the file to VMDK:

qemu-img.exe info convert -p "G:\Hyper-V\Crypto\Virtual Hard Disks\Crypto.vhdx" -0 vmdk d:\vmwareworkstation\VMs\Crypto\Crypto_OS.vmdk

6.) Once completed, the VMDK will be ready to use.