I recently ran into a tricky issue while upgrading NVIDIA vGPU on a VMware ESXi host using an NVIDIA A2 GPU. On my Management Core Server, I replaced an NVIDIA Tesla P4 with an NVIDIA A2 because the A2 has more VRAM and supports newer vGPU releases. The P4 is still a capable GPU and…
Category: Home Lab
Building a Custom Silent Cooler for NVIDIA A2 and L4 Data Center GPUs with n3rdware
My goal with my home lab has always been clear. Keep it as silent as possible and as cool as possible, without sacrificing performance. Recently I started working more seriously with the NVIDIA A2 and the NVIDIA L4. Both are data center GPUs designed to operate inside rack servers with strong, directed airflow. They do…
Crysis 2 Remastered Breaks Gaming Memory Leak World Record
Before diving into the world of data center workloads, I decided to warm up by testing the performance of the PNY NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition GPU with a variety of games. I played a handful of titles, and before long, viewers on my YouTube channel started suggesting more games to benchmark with…
Why Every Home Labber Should Attend Events Like VMware Explore
Before Silicon Valley turned into what it is today—endless tech campuses and VC pitches—there was this little thing called the Homebrew Computer Club. It wasn’t fancy, it wasn’t organized like a conference, and it definitely wasn’t about business plans. It was just a bunch of people who were genuinely obsessed with figuring things out, meeting…
Man Cave & Home Lab Gallery
Desk Sony HT- A9 360 Spatial Sound Mapping Dolby Atmos®/DTS:X® Home Theater System Home Lab Dell EMC S4112T-ON Switch Servers CPU Cooler m.2 NVMe cooler GPU
PNY NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 96GB Blackwell Workstation Edition
My homelab just got a big upgrade to run large Private AI models, experiment, train, and have some fun. The PNY NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition is an absolute beast—the most powerful workstation GPU ever made. (96GB GDDR7, 600W, PCIe 5, AI performance 4000 TOPS, RT Core Performance 380 TFLOPS, Single-Precision Performance 125…
Blank Virtual Hardware Tab in VM Edit Settings After Replacing Network Adapter
In vCenters, when I replaced the vmxnet3 network adapter on the VM with a vmxnet adapter and clicked OK, I encountered an issue. After attempting to switch back to the vmxnet3 adapter, the VM’s ‘edit settings’ Virtual Hardware tab was blank, regardless of whether the VM was powered on or off. Solution: I logged into…
How Fast Is My Home Lab?
I have been tuning my Home Lab network during my vacation. Private AI/ML, vGPU and VDI requires a fast Home Lab setup. I tweaked my Switch (Dell EMC S4112T-ON), UDM Pro, ESXi hosts, and also revisited the subnetting logic. I went over my servers’ BIOS CPU and RAM features and found out that default settings…
Quick Guide on How to Use iperf3 to Measure Throughput Between Two ESXi 8.0 Update 3 Hosts or VMs
Preparation: Steps for Each Host: Testing: Final Steps: This guide will help you test network bandwidth between two ESXi hosts effectively using iperf3. Remember to restore the original security settings after completing your tests to maintain the security of your hosts.
How to configure Dell EMC S4112T-ON Switch OS10 RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
I have often found it difficult to find commands that actually work because it seems that Dell Switch commands not only differ by OS version but can also vary based on the model, and of course, I do not rule out that there may be some differences according to the firmware version. This is a…