In this fun packed issue of the Wahl Network Tech Blast, I uncover all sorts of interesting, real-world events, pitfalls, and FUDlicious topics. There’s also a fair bit of bug related posts to dive into for those running the latest release of VMware vSphere or HP SPP.

Brain Food

#FeedForward – VMUG Initiative To Give Back to the Community – I’ve been keeping an eyeball on this program called FeedForward. Mike Laverick has been heavily advocating the program, which helps mentor others in the virtualization community who wish to share their experiences and expertise at a VMUG or similar event.

Notes From the Field: VSAN Design – Looking for some VMware Virtual SAN design tips from someone who is going through the process? Jason Langer offers advice from his designs, including the resources he’s using and various decision points to consider. I think this is the first post I’ve read that discusses Virtual SAN beyond just a bill-of-materials (BoM) or hypothetical designs. Although, Jason Nash covers some lab impacts that he’s seen as they affect memory utilization.

New Post at Thwack! – Too Many Tools – Are there too many tools in your environment? Michael Stump pontificates on the idea during his tour as a Thwack Ambassador.

NFS Disconnects in VMware vSphere 5.5 U1 – In a sad day for NFS users, vSphere 5.5 update 1 apparently causes your NFS datastores to give up the ghost periodically. I’ve experienced this in my lab and can confirm it’s 100% true (I also saw an issue on the vMotion VMkernel port, too). How did this pass QA? 😛

ESXi 5.5, Dell VRTX and Storage – or the lack there of! – I’m a bit jealous that Mike Preston gets to play with a Dell VRTX; these boxes seem really snazzy. He takes the time to point out that 5.5 is not yet officially supported but offers a way to resolve this by using a different driver for the storage adapter.

Q&A: Interview – The HacKid Conference 2014 – I watched the photos roll in over the weekend as the HacKid Conference took place. This thing looked legendary; where were these events when I was a wee lad? 🙂

The Eternal Wait For Vendor Software Updates – Bob Plankers goes relatively deep into the world of software development around the “Heartbleed” bug and why it is taking so long for various software providers to release code that patches the vulnerability. His “educational rant” style of blogging is always refreshing and insightful.

What is your Virtual Machine Lifecycle Process – Mr. Selfies himself, Tommy Trogden, takes the time to blog about one of my personal favorite subjects: the virtual machine lifecycle. I think he does a solid job at breaking down what ideal means from his point of view, along with various offerings that address a workload’s lifecycle. It’ll probably tie in well to the new vCAC 6.0 course that was made available in the last few weeks.

What just happened at Storage Field Day 5? An open letter to all – Trust Eric Wright to turn a somewhat uncomfortable situation on the Twitters into a lesson learned. Additionally, the amount of people calling FUD has itself turned into FUD – crying wolf will conjure one? It’s important to remember what FUD even stands for (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) – note that “education” is not among these letters, and it’s absolutely OK to talk about any vendor you wish from a factual and educational standpoint. Some of the best vendor panels I’ve ever engaged with are able to talk about one another openly.

Convert VMware to Hyper-V with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 2.0 – The 4sysops crew has a step-by-step article that outlines how to convert vSphere VMs to either Hyper-V or Azure. Seems like a nice way to test out your workload on another hypervisor or cloud platform without having to use an in-guest migration tool from a 3rd party. Sadly, the article doesn’t really give any use cases that would surround this migration beyond a dismissive zinger. Oh well. 🙁

Learning NSX, Part 12: Integrating VMware NSX with OpenStack –  The Learning NVP/NSX series from Scott Lowe is a must-read for anyone who is looking to deploy NSX in the future. Part 11 and 12, which focus on OpenStack, have been especially interesting to me.

WARNING: HP G2-G6 server nics killed by firmware update in HP SPP 2014.02 – Much like it says in the subject, there is an issue with drivers that kill Broadcom NICs in a wide variety of HP servers. Julian Wood details the entire list of affected adapters in his post.

Chris’ Thinking Cap

I think both the VMware and HP code issues highlight how important it is to avoid being bleeding edge, while at the same time making me ponder exactly what differentiates bleeding edge from common sense patching. In both the VMware and HP cases, the release is still very new, leading me to put both situations into the bleeding edge category.

[symple_highlight color=”blue”]Do you feel that a release within 2 months is considered bleeding edge, or are those folks caught by the bugs just a victim of poor QA processes – either internally or by the manufacturer (or both)?[/symple_highlight]