I know I haven’t posted for a little while. I have been looking into some new things. For the most part I do .Net development and use the various different Microsoft technologies available, like TFS, MVC, Web Api, etc.

I have now embarked on a little home project and wanted to learn some new skills. So I brought a Lenovo Thinkserver TS140 from ebuyer and got to work.

Hypervisor I knew very little about this when I started, I had created

virtual machines on my development machine using virtualbox and vmware player, but I have never had to setup a decidated machine for it. Therefore when I started I wasn’t quite sure what I needed to do to set it all up. I looked around on the internet and spoke to a few people and settled on vmware ESXI.

Installing ESXI was pretty easy. I used a tool called rufus (download here) to create a bootable usb drive and then installed ESXI to the same usb drive during installation.

After setting it up I have made only a few changes to my installation, the only ones of note were adding the hard drive as a datastore and setting a static ip. Apart from that my setup is pretty much default.

It is really easy to setup and create new virtual machines.

Things I am working on at the moment #####Puppet I am currently looking into

setuping up my environment to be maintable, predictable and recreatable. So I am looking into puppet again this is another skill I wanted to learn as well.

I am currently going through a couple of tutorials on this subject.

1. Pluralsight course - puppet system adminstrators fundamentals
2. Puppet’s offical learn course

Jenkins Another technology I am looking into is continous intergration and

continous delivery. I have worked mainly with TFS before, but at home I don’t want to have to pay the fee for a license so I am using Jenkins on a linux distro.

Again I have been watching a course at pluralight for this one, Jenkins introduction.

MEAN Stack I am normally a .Net developer day to day but I have wanted to

learn something new so for my new project at home I have been looking to learn the MEAN stack, again this does have the advantage of running on a linux VM so no license fees, although VNext support on linux is supposed to be pretty good even though it is still in beta.

Again it is another pluralsight video building angularjs nodejs apps mean

GitLab I wanted to host my own code, I have recently been using BitBucket

for all my home projects, but looking into jenkins if I wanted web hooks I would have to open up access to my build server externally and I didn’t want to have to go through that hassle. So I decided to install GitLab.

Overall Goal The overall goal for this project is to have the starting blocks

in place for a fully functionaly automated environment at home. Each service I have is installed on it’s own dedicated virtual machine. I also want to be able to teardown and recreate if need any machine and have the ability to do so without fear!

I will be writing more posts in the future regarding everything I have been doing.