Setting up the Weathervane Benchmarking Tool in the Home Lab

Standing up Weathervane in the home lab will provide hands-on for developing skills like creating a template VM, creating a guest customization specification, working with some basic Linux commands, working with an app with multiple tiers, creating a guest customization specification, cloning VMs, and monitoring performance metrics. This post provides an overview of how I set up Weathervane in my home lab, an example of the results generated from the Weathervane runs, and a look at the performance metrics I observed in lab during the Weathervane runs.

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SSL Certs for View Access to TCC Labs

I have been working on a project to provide labs for the VMware IT Academy Program and the Cyber Security Program offered at Tidewater Community College. This post covers the process I followed and includes some of the resources I found helpful for replacing the default self-signed certificates with certificates signed by a CA.

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Book Review: IT Architect: Foundation in the Art of Infrastructure Design

IT Architect: Foundation in the Art of Infrastructure Design is well written and an easy read. I read it cover to cover over a couple nights. I found myself marking multiple pages to refer back to. It is packed with a great deal of useful information for both the seasoned Architect and those who are looking to gain a bit more insight on the process for creating a high quality design. The book focuses on enterprise class, but the design process can easily be (and should be) applied to any size or type of datacenter design.

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