Welcome to the Flackbox blog, where my aim is to help you build your cloud and data center career. If you’re looking to widen your knowledge across server, networking and storage technologies then you’ve come to the right place. I regularly upload training video tutorials featuring vendors such as Cisco, NetApp and VMware.

VMware SRM Site Recovery Manager with NetApp SnapMirror Lab Guide

Posted on February 1, 2019 By Vincent Li

This guide has complete step by step instructions to help you setup a home lab for VMware SRM Site Recovery Manager with the NetApp Snapmirror Data Protection solution. Everything is free and because it’s virtualized you can run it all on your laptop. Lab Guide by Vincent Li. Vincent has over ...

SuperPutty Installation and Configuration Tutorial

Posted on January 17, 2019 By Flackbox

I get asked quite regularly what the cool SSH client application I use in my videos is. SuperPutty runs on top of Putty and allows you to connect to the CLI of multiple devices in different tabs in the same window. This is much more convenient than having a separate window for each device, and [&hel...

VyOS Router Installation and Configuration Tutorial

Posted on January 15, 2019 By Flackbox

This NetApp training tutorial explains how to install and configure the VyOS virtual router in VMware Workstation. The networks and IP addresses configured in the tutorial are for my NetApp lab, but you can easily adapt them to any project you’re working on. Scroll down for the step by step vi...

VMware Workstation Player Installation & Configuration

Posted on January 14, 2019 By Flackbox

This NetApp training tutorial explains how to download, install, and configure VMware Workstation Player, the free version of VMware for Windows Desktops. The networks and IP addresses configured in the tutorial are for my NetApp lab, but you can easily adapt them to any project you’re working...

NetApp ONTAP 9 Hardware Architecture

Posted on January 10, 2019 By Flackbox

In this NetApp training tutorial, I will discuss the NetApp ONTAP clustered hardware architecture. In the last post, we covered the scalability limitations that existed in legacy 7-Mode, the main problems being that there is a maximum of two controllers in the same system and it does not support act...

NetApp 7-Mode Hardware Architecture Tutorial

Posted on January 3, 2018 By Flackbox

In this NetApp training tutorial, I will cover the 7-Mode Hardware Architecture. ONTAP 7-Mode was deprecated after version 8.2 of the operating system, but it’s much easier to understand the clustered hardware architecture of Clustered ONTAP and ONTAP 9 if you see the 7-Mode architecture first...

Cisco BGP for Enterprises

Posted on December 26, 2018 By Flackbox

In this Cisco CCNA training tutorial, you will learn why an enterprise (rather than an Internet Service Provider) would use BGP and how to configure BGP from the enterprise point of view. Scroll down for the video and also text tutorial.   This is the 5th in a series of BGP tutorials. Part 1:...

How to Advertise BGP Routes on Cisco Routers

Posted on December 19, 2018 By Flackbox

In this Cisco CCNA training tutorial, you’ll learn how to advertise routes in BGP (including the differences in the way the “network” statement is used and the “null route” trick).  Scroll down for the video and also text tutorial.   This is the 4th in a series o...