I ran GLM against DeepSeek on two Sparks. The headline number was the least useful one.
I reproduced DeepSeek v4.1 Flash at 103 tokens per second on my two DGX Sparks, then benchmarked it against GLM-5.3-Flash on real work.
The lab is where an architecture diagram meets the hardware I actually own. These field notes follow ESXi, vCenter and Kubernetes builds through licensing gates, storage limits and networking mistakes, with the error strings and unfinished steps left in.
Start with the state of the homelab for the physical layout and its limits. The vCenter and VKS posts then form a sequence: establish the management plane, work through prerequisites, and enable the service. Pi-hole is a smaller example of a useful workload running on that infrastructure.
Start here
- There is no cloud. It's a Dell workstation in a spare room.
- Standing up vCenter 9.1 in a nested lab without ever mounting the ISO
- VKS on the nested lab: everything before Workload Management
- Kubernetes That Stops Being a Second Platform
- The OEM NVMe that ESXi 9.1 refuses to see
- I run Pi-hole on Kubernetes. There is no Pi.
Field notes on this topic
How I moved the Field Signal newsroom into VKS on the Dell.
The Dell VKS build behind my Field Signal newsroom: Avi, storage, private Spark inference, migration failures, and verified publication.
I rebuilt Field Signal around my local AI.
I rebuilt Field Signal around a local model API on my Spark, with workers on Dell VKS and Paperclip for review. More room to build and learn.
I connected VCF Operations to my Spark. I am not keeping the setup.
I connected VCF Intelligent Assist to private Qwen on DGX Spark. The inventory query worked, but the required Log Management footprint did not fit my lab.
I bought a Spark. Now I want to put local agents to work.
My DGX Spark now runs Field Signal’s text agents. Next: practical agent workflows for VCF Operations, vDefend security reviews, and Avi application health.
My lab has an IT support team now. Nobody on it is allowed to touch anything.
A read-only AI IT support team for a private cloud lab: VCF Operations evidence, typed Jev judgments, and six bounded read-only specialists that end every investigation by asking a human. What is live, what is only planned, and the night the cluster it runs on ran out of memory.
My homelab was beefy. It still wasn't enough.
A homelab update: why I outgrew a rack of old enterprise hardware, the MINISFORUM MS-A2 I bought to replace it, what NVMe memory tiering does for a small box, and where this blog is headed next: on-prem AI workloads, agents, and how to run them safely.
From AI Factory to AgentMinder: bringing AI workloads into the private cloud.
VMware AI Factory, models as a service, token economics, and agent security explained through my AgentMinder lab, with the roles of Tanzu, vDefend, and Avi.
VMware’s private cloud has more to do. Here’s what changed.
VMware Explore 2026 and VCF 9.1.1, explained: private AI, agent controls, platform operations, and what is available now.
The GPU I need does not live in my house. So I rent someone else's and pretend it does.
My homelab is great at everything except the one thing AI needs: a real GPU. So I rent one by the hour from a neo-cloud, pull it into the tailnet, and tear it down in a finally block. The buy-versus-rent math, priced honestly.
Kubernetes That Stops Being a Second Platform
A hands-on build log of enabling vSphere Kubernetes Service end to end — the wizard, the networking, the gate everyone forgets — and an honest case for why VKS fits if you already run vSphere.
I wanted private AI. What I had to decide was Kubernetes.
The GPU is the part everyone budgets for and the part I never needed. An open model runs privately on CPUs you already own — so the real decision is the platform underneath it.
The upgrade worked. Turning the machine back on is what failed.
An agent-driven ESXi upgrade that succeeded, a restore step that failed on a precondition nobody checked, and a rollback that retried the exact action that had just failed. What I got wrong.
A 2.8-trillion-parameter model fits in 8 GB of RAM. It writes one token every 32 seconds.
Two new engines run frontier Mixture-of-Experts models on consumer hardware by paging experts off SSD instead of holding them in memory. Why that works, why it is slow, why C is not the reason, what a GPU does and does not fix, and what it means for air-gapped estates and hardware refresh planning.
Agents are a new class of workload. Private cloud is where you contain them.
An agent with a kubeconfig is not an information system, it is an operator. Part 1 of a series on why least privilege, RBAC and audit logs all quietly assume the actor is deterministic, and how VCF and VKS primitives bound something that is not.
I run Pi-hole on Kubernetes. There is no Pi.
How I added DNS-level ad-blocking to my whole Tailscale network with Pi-hole, running it as a container with its own Tailscale identity instead of on a Raspberry Pi, why the tailnet is the right network for it, and the honest state of a build that is 44 minutes old.
There is no cloud. It's a Dell workstation in a spare room.
A mid-2026 state-of-the-homelab: one Dell workstation running Proxmox, a Raspberry Pi, a bare-metal ESXi box, and twelve Tailscale devices running real websites and a fleet of agents, with no public IP and one deliberate single point of failure.
VKS on the nested lab: everything before Workload Management
A build log for putting VKS (vSphere Kubernetes Service) on a resource-constrained nested vSphere lab: the license gate, a fresh vCenter 9.1, three prerequisite failures, and why Workload Management is still unenabled.
I built a personal AI that decides when to interrupt me. In 30 days it decided no 1,784 times.
A build log for Supra, my personal AI system: skill dispatch via tool use, a proactive judge stuck in cold-start deadlock, and a self-improvement loop that mined a test fixture.
Giving Rhodes write access to my infrastructure
What it took to let an agent restart VMs and delete snapshots on real infrastructure: the tier model, the guardrails in code, and the bugs found along the way.
Standing up vCenter 9.1 in a nested lab without ever mounting the ISO
A build log for deploying VCSA 9.1 onto a mixed nested/bare-metal ESXi lab: hybrid ISO extraction, thin-provisioning prechecks, pyvmomi inventory, and licensing walls.
The OEM NVMe that ESXi 9.1 refuses to see
Bare-metal ESXi 9.1 on an EliteDesk 800 G6: the bundled SK hynix BC511 reports an all-zero NGUID, so ESXi never creates a device. What actually fixed it.