Yesterday, all my VMs seemed so far away

A few days ago I had some exciting projects and I wanted to share those stories with you. However, I already finished them on the production machines and I decided to simply reproduce the whole process in my virtual lab.

I opened VirtualBox and I began to turn on all needful VMs. One machine started, then another one, everything looked fine as usual. Then my fan became very noisy, CPU load jumped on all cores and every other machine either endlessly booted or the boot process lasted almost 15 minutes.

The party just started! I took a deep breath and boldly went where no one had gone before.

How to get or set VLAN id for any Hyper-V based VM?

Today, I will show you how to check assigned VLAN id or to set one using the power shell. Of course, you can to the same action using the Hyper-V manager GUI tool. Nonetheless, this power shell based method can be used anywhere, including the Hyper-V command line.

How to start any Hyper-V VM using the power shell?

Ten days ago, two Hyper-V servers were automatically updated, restarted and their VMs left in the Saved state. Well, yes, I know… Any virtual host shouldn’t be configured for automatic updates. However, those two hosts were regularly updated for months without any problem. Until that morning.

Now, you will say “OK, I will launch the Hyper-V Manager GUI and solve this problem”. That’s nice if you’re in the same network. Nevertheless, those servers are with two different customers, in their own separated work groups and my laptop wasn’t configured to manage them. The only available way was to use the power shell.

Let’s make the command line kung fu!

A Windows VPN connection failed from the VirtualBox VM

Today, I want to share with you one intriguing story about the problem I faced a few days ago. I went to my colleague’s home to work on one project.

I’m using the VirtualBox VMs for my remote works. I launched that VM, checked again all VPN parameters and tried to connect. And the VPN connection gloriously failed.

The new version of my virtual lab

I would like to share in this article the most significant changes in my virtual lab. There were so many changes in my virtual lab during the past 3-4 years and, for your convenience, I want to highlight here the most significant updates.

Currently, I’m using the fifth version of my virtual infrastructure. In essence, I’m continuously expanding my virtual lab, adding more virtual machines to cover the newer, even more complex, scenarios.