As a UNIX guy I often fail to consider that not everything which utilizes point & click is automatically intuitive. Configurability's Achillies heel is in its complexity, and VMware's vast suite of tools is infinitely configurable. Hello intricacy! I've been running ESXi for longer than I can count using both hands, but never as an Enterprise-level VMware administrator - while I am aware of its daunting challenges, there's nothing quite like being thrust into unfamiliar territory for humble clarification.

I was dismayed vSAN didn't easily and automatically configure itself based upon a series of guesswork, mild interest, and median effort, but that's on me. So instead of sleeping last night, I fired up our employer-provided learning site and began watching technical training videos. Somewhere between the philosophy surrounding its use and the technical howto, I mused on how rote this all would be if I could simply virtualize vSphere itself to create a lab-within-a-lab, free from impacting the very platform on which I was standing in order to test. As you may have already surmised, these thoughts quickly turned from fanciful, to obsessive.

Those of you who are already familiar with this course of action may be confused how I could get "routine" from adding additional layers of configuration into an already complex environment, but that's not necessarily how us stereotypically lazy UNIX administrators operate; we vacillate between brilliant creativity in engineering an over-the-top solution for even the simplest problem, to orchestrating incomprehensibly bare-minimum solutions to otherwise sticky problems completely dependent upon our level of interest in the project at hand, and this had assuredly caught my attention.

In the annals of my blog I oft repeat how I embrace the RTFM-only-as-a-last-resort school of thought, so once again I winged it, albeit this time with increasing interest and above-average (for me) effort. I'm running three (3) vSphere 6.7u3 servers as virtual machines, with vCenter 7.0.3 as one of their virtual machines in an elegant display reminiscent of nested Matryoshka dolls and finished nesting their respective discrete virtual switches. I still don't entirely know what I'm doing, but it sure is a lot of fun.

Back in the day we had just about every fantasy, comic book, and sci-fi fandom covered in our server naming conventions; more often than not clashing when they let us - the system administrators - name the data center servers and the workstations on our desks. Daily, we'd log into wookie from elrond to check the backups from batman the night before. Long gone are those days not only in corporate, but even in my own home lab. I have 150+ entries in my DNS server and all hostnames are utilitarian in nature because there's just too much to keep up with. While it might not be as much fun to log into smt, rmt, susemgr, sles12sp4, dnsmasq, bkpsrv, and hpvm4 its a hell of a lot easier than when I was younger and had fewer boxes.

There is one notable exception: belanna.

My first unix server was a comically heavy HP 9000/755 workstation - with those enormous full height SCSI drives which was reminiscent of turbofans found on large, military transports during initial power-on. I don't know why I settled on B'Elanna as my first server name, but soon a slew of Sun Solaris boxes surrounded her; kes, sesksa, janeway, and 7of9 (yes, even after all this time I remember them all fondly; SPARCstation 5, SPARCstation 10, ULTRASparc 60, and an EnterpriseSPARC 250). doctor was my first IRIX box, an Indigo 2 I no longer have, and the Indy sitting adjacent me as I author this, has inherited its namesake.

At some point I grew weary of lugging around that ridiculously heavy 755/125 with its special HIL-keyboard and mouse and awkward sync-on-green coax-connect monitor - and traded it in on a beautifully light and functional HP 9000 712/80. It was impressively quick given its age when it was running 10.20, much less so when running 11.0. I was like a madman with the upgrades stuffing a 10k RPM drive in its minuscule chassis and maxing out its RAM. The fact that it could use a standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse and regular VGA monitor gave a whole new meaning to the word, "portable." This was belanna for many more years.

I wish I had kept all my pizza box form-factors, I do. I have so few regrets in my life, and that is one of them. I had amassed so many 64-bit boxes, we'd decided to ditch every 32-bit machine we had. Later (and I don't remember the exact circumstances in which Mr. Ernest Cody suggested I take home a couple of rx2600's he'd acquired), belanna evolved to Itanium and has been running on and off ever since, and what a workhorse she's been! I used her to teach myself IVM (Itanium Virtual Machine - later HP Virtual Machine), Service Guard clustering, and have pressed her into service every time we've had an immediate need at work for an HP/UX machine (you may be surprised how often that happens, even now). And this is why every login, and every hpvm carries the notation, "HEC Foundation."

She's down a bank of RAM these days, and HPVMs disallow her from unlocking her hyper-threaded cores, but she's currently running four 11iv3 hpvms for training purposes, and I couldn't be more proud of her.