If you haven’t noticed by now, each Tech Blast “featured” graphic now makes absolutely no sense and is entirely there for fun and a cheap laugh. I’m OK with this because it’s a Saturday and we all need funny pictures now and again. Hopefully, you are too. Let’s dive into some well seasoned brain food (yum).

Brain Food

Ahhh! The Heartbleed Vulnerability – The infamous XKCD site (you do read the comic, right?) has published both a whimsical and technical comic on the Heartbleed vulnerability. For those looking after an ESXi environment, check out VMAdmin’s post on the fact that ESXi 5.5 is vulnerable, along with a VMware KB on products that are affected (hint: only ESXi 5.5 and vCenter 5.5). I’m a bit surprised at how nonchalantly this bug was published, as it seemed like few manufacturers / services were given enough warning to properly fix the hole. Am I wrong?

VMware Horizon 6 – A Closer Look At Application Remoting – In case you are living under a rock or had your tin foil hat on extra tight, VMware has dropped the Horizon 6 bombshell on the world of VDI I mean EUC or wait is it Mobility now? Acronym jokes aside, this one baked in some application remoting features for hosted applications. Of course, the king of insanely long blog URLs, Brian Madden, has published his thoughts on Horizon 6 over on his blog. Seriously, Brian, could you make the titles any longer? 🙂

Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO, Interop 2014 Keynote – I loves me some free video content, and Interop has published the keynote given by VMware’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, from the latest Interop 2014 conference. This one is all about defining your data center with software, a la SDDC.

Reviews of Networking for VMware Administrators – The silo crushing Networking for VMware Administrators book hit shelves a few weeks ago. And yes, I am a co-author, so this is obviously a little bit of self promition! A few members of the virtualization community, such as Sam McGeown, have taken the time to write up their experience and thoughts around the book. It’s been generally positive, which is cool, and if you also wrote a review on your blog feel free to drop a comment below to let me know! As a reminder, all of my proceeds are going to the Alzheimer’s Association charity. I think Steve’s profits are going to his “send my three kids to college” charity. 🙂

What Next for x86 Hardware Industry: The Death of the Blade Format? – I really enjoy reading the Virtualization Practice for their thought provoking articles and experiences. Tom Howarth takes a crack at blade servers and their impending doom in the data center. Although I don’t agree with all points made, I enjoyed his perspective and think you will too.

Gotcha – Disable reserve all guest memory setting does not remove the reservation – If you’ve dealt with a high performance, RAM hungry workload in the past, you’ve probably clicked the “reserve all guest memory (all locked)” button in vSphere. Frank Denneman provides a bit of a warning for those who are looking to toggle the feature. I’ve never turned it off, so this was interesting to me. 🙂

Who Made Your SSDs and Why It Matters – The king of breaking embargoes, Jason Nash, has published a well crafted article on SSD choice. As expected, the S3700 is mentioned, but also some others you may not have encountered before. Nicely done, Jason.

Some useful vSphere related diagrams – Diagrams! Who doesn’t love diagrams? Here are some good ones. Enjoy.

New vBrownBag Program: vBrownBag Jr. – Now this is truly fascinating. Josh Atwell, a member of the vBrownBag crew, has posted an article around the latest vBrownBag program called vBrownBag Jr. This is focused on kids. Check it out!

Cisco Expands ACI Initiative With New Nexus 9000 Switches – Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is nearly always a hot topic. Jeffrey Burt over at eWeek pounces on the Nexus 3000 unveiling, further expanding the ACI portfolio. I’ve yet to dig all that deep into the various models and SKUs available in the 9000 lineup, so this just adds to the list of hardware that I’ll need to digest in the coming months.

Chris’ Thinking Cap

Up until recently I have always  used a low end, budget friendly keyboard at home. However, I changed this pattern of behavior after dealing with sore fingers after a random 18 hour day on the keyboard. It may seem odd, but I decided to snag a Logitech G710+ keyboard, marketed as being for “gamers”, to reduce hand fatigue and increase my words-per-minute (WPM). It’s not cheap – being just over $100 USD – but after a week I can honestly say that it’s a night and day change to incorporate mechanical, Brown Cherry MX key switches into my keyboard. Seeing as how I type thousands of words per day, I figure this is just an investment in my own sanity and health.

Is this weird, or have you something similar in your home or work environment? I mainly see people with the bundled cheapo keyboard that came with the computer, so I’m just not sure. I also hate wireless keyboards.