Eric Monjoin
Staff Consulting Architect but also pilot, spending time in front of my computer or flying in the air...

Category: Uncategorized

Home Lab Upgrade

Recently I did a full Home Lab upgrade, removing my old Dell R820 + Dell R720 and Intel NUCs for some bunch of server, given me the possibility to have much more capacity and performance than before.

Thanks eBay as it was my main provider, so here the new configuration :

vSphere 8 – vSAN cluster composed of :
– 4 x Dell R630 (E5-2667 v4 @ 3.20GHz and 192GB RAM each)
– 4 x 480GB SAS SSD for Cache
– 8 x 1TB SATA SSD for Data

vSphere 8 – Single server :
– 1x T420 (E5-2440 @ 2.40GHz and 164GB RAM) – 5x 900GB SAS HDD (RAID-5) + 5 x 480GB SAS SSD (3PAR SDD converted to run on Perc H710P)

1x Nutanix CE 2.1 :
– 1x R620 (E5-2630Lv2 @ 2.40GHz and 192GB RAM)
– 1x 73GB SAS HDD for Hypervisor
– 2x 480GB SAS SSD for CVM
– 4x 900GB 15K SAS HDD for data

1x Switch Arista DCS-7050TX-72Q 48x 10GBase-T
Used as my Core Switch

1x Switch Cisco 2960G
Used as a specific LAN connected to my secondary Internet router

1x NAS Synology DS1511+DX510-2
– 5x 1TB HDD SATA – RAID 5
– 3x 1TB HDD SATA – Synology Hybrid RAID
– 2x 1TB SSD SATA – RAID 0)

PFX to PEM

When working on EUC and SDDC solutions (and yes now for everything) we have to use certificates.

I mostly used Microsoft Certificate Services for all my internal servers and a Public wildcard certificate for external access. So to create certificate, the best is to used the Windows MMC and the export the certificate as .PFX to get both the certificate and the private key used to generate it.

However some product like Workspace One Access ask for certificate as PEM format so I used the following script to convert PFX to PEM with OpenSSL.

It’s a batch script who need two arguments, the first one is the name of the certificate without the extension and the second argument is the password used to encrypt Private key

Eg. my PFX certificate is myserver.mydomain.local.pfx so I juste have to type : pfx2pem.bat myserver.mydomain.local mypassword