For some reason, I felt like a rebellious storm trooper would provide just the right amount of meme irony to kick off the 6th issue of the Wahl Network Tech Blast. I’ve changed the format a bit to make the Brian Food segment easier to read (I hope). So, let’s dive in!
Brain Food
[table th=”0″]1;The annual Top VMware and Virtualization Blog voting has been once again unleashed upon the community, courtesy of Mr. Siebert. I didn’t read any of the “vote for me” posts but did find Stephen Foskett’s scientific approach to be unique. Don’t forget that this year both the voters and votees (that even a word?) have a chance to win prizes.
2;I’ve been spending time with OpenStack’s Nova and Swift components, trying to both learn more about them and hopefully one day get a commit into the projects. Eric Wright points out a great resource that just hit Early Release status: Deploying OpenStack from Ken Pepple. It’s available for pre-order and looks sharp.
3;Well known blogger and author Maish Saidel-Keesing has posted his thoughts on making those first steps towards DevOps. The blending of development and operations is yet another great way that we’re tearing down functional silos in the world of IT.
4;Have you spent much time with a variety of different hypervisors? Mike Laverick has, and walks you through his experience with Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 in his Hyper-V R2eality: VMs not so hot after all… post.
5;A big congratulations to two of our community authors are in order! Robert van den Nieuwendijk has published his Learning PowerCLI book and Lauren Malhoit has published her VMware vCenter Operations Manager Essentials book. I’ve snagged both and have enjoyed the pages that I’ve managed to read so far (and recommended the PowerCLI book in my recent Stop Being a Mine Sweeper keynote at the Toronto VMUG User Conference). If you do grab one of these great resources, make sure to leave the author an Amazon review to help show your support for the content.
6;One of the communities favorite tools, RVTools, has been upgraded! The new version, 3.6, contains a plethora of goodies for you and is still free. Here’s the version info page to check out the hotness that is 3.6.[/table]
[table th=”0″]7;Using a Broadcom adapter in your vSphere environment? Ivo Beerens points out a KB article that reveals data corruption with the tg3 driver that is definitely worth verifying in your data center.
8;VMware is holding a Virtual SAN (VSAN) Special Online Event on March 6th at 10AM Pacific. The amount of exposure and hype around VMware’s VSAN from VMware employees has been pretty strong. I’m very curious if this trend will continue into real field deployments once VSAN becomes generally available and production ready.
9;There are now 132 VMware Certified Design Experts on the planet Earth. Recently, VMware has been blogging the names of successful defenders and has posted the 8 new numbers. I like this trend!
10;Virtualization blogger Luca Dell’Oca, recently hired by Veeam, has published a blog post testing PernixData’s FVP product in his lab. His main goal was to “see how much Pernix can speed up [his] lab” and he does exactly this with some HP G5 servers and Fusion-IO ioDrives!
11;Filip Verloy writes about Horizon Branch Office Desktop Architecture on his personal blog. It includes a variety of partner solutions and diagrams to mull over when trying to offer services to a branch office.
12;Working with vCenter Server 5.5? Rick Blythe has posted a Top 20 vCenter Server 5.5 Issues list on the VMware Support Insider blog. I’ve run into a few of these, and there are also some best practices docs, so this resource is well worth reading or bookmarking if you plan to make the jump to 5.5 at any point.[/table]
Chris’ Thinking Cap
Bruce Davie, a Principal Engineer at VMware’s Networking and Security business unit, wrote a post around network virtualization that I finally had a chance to read. For those that aren’t familiar with Mr. Davie, he was part of the team that created MPLS (no small feat). Of interest to me is the growing trend moving towards Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), which is something that VMware’s Brad Hedlund and Scott Lowe bring up frequently when I hear them talking about VMware NSX. Case in point, Mr. Hedlund has a great post on the NSX Edge Services Router (ESR) and Distributed Logical Router (DLR) that serves as a learning primer.
[symple_highlight color=”blue”]What are your thoughts on NFV and how you might leverage various distributed services for your environment?[/symple_highlight]
