Fill your belly on some spectacular brain food while waiting for VMworld – which is next week! There’s a lot of great content in this volume of Tech Blast, so let’s dig in.

Brain Food

Reading and Understanding the OSPF Database – Chances are that your network team runs one of the various IGP (interior gateway protocol) to connect the dots with your data center. I have found that this particular guide is an excellent run through on the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol. Learn more about the OSPF database, what Shortest Path First (SPF) does, and what is stored in a Link State Database (LSDB).

Memory management: VMware ESXi vs. Microsoft Hyper-V – Blogger Patrick Terlisten has written an excellent guide on memory management across the first and second most common hypervisors found in data center’s today. Worth a read for anyone, especially if you plan on running Exchange on Hyper-V.

7 Things You Need To Stop Doing To Be More Productive, Backed By Science – My wife pointed out this article to me, I assume because I’m constantly working on a myriad of projects (and so is she). The author takes some rather common sayings and backs them up with actual data – imagine that! You might also want to share this one with your boss. 🙂

Deep Dive: vSphere Traffic Shaping – Enter the mysterious world of traffic shaping with VCDX Joseph Griffiths. He also offers some ideas around why you might want to use Network IO Control (NIOC) instead.

The Gamesters of Transmogrification – Yes, it’s a long read. But it’s a bit like a story, which makes it interesting and, quite frankly, spot on. If you’re at all interested in the what, why, and how of APIs, check this out.

VUPaaS Episode 21 – Certs, Chaos Monkeys and Warm Bags of Meat – The main host and editor of VUPaaS, Gurusimran Khalsa (or just “GS” if you please), has come up with a fantastic title for episode 21, which features Alastair Cooke. If you’re at all curious about how training and certifications look from a VMware Certified Instructor’s (VCI) point of view, you should find this one enjoyable. Also, I rant (yet again) about certifications and their expirations.

Double VCDX and the New VCDX-NV – Jason Nash provides some more details and thoughts around the new VCDX-NV (Network Virtualization) track. We’ll both be at VMworld in a week to deliver sessions on the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and on NSX in the Real World, so come check that out and please say hello.

EMC CEO Tucci Pushes Back at VMware Spinoff Idea – For those that might have missed it, some folks on the Street (slang for Wall Street) were making a case for EMC to break up their federation into separate companies. EMC actually owns a rather large chunk of VMware. Joe Tucci had other thoughts on the matter.

Isolated Internet Outages Caused By BGP Spike – I don’t think this particular issue affected me in anything meaningful way, but it sure did cause a stir and issues for others. Check out just what the heck happened with the large BGP spike (border gateway protocol, it sort of runs the Internet). Make sure to summarize those routes, folks! 😉

Intel Disables TSX Instructions: Erratum Found in Haswell, Haswell-E/EP, Broadwell-Y – Lots of Intel in the news lately, it seems. First there’s a series of articles about the erratum found in a number of processor documents, which are causing a handful of nasty issues. Then, I dig up some news on the 14 nanometer (nm) processes being worked on in their newest generation of chips in this Intel’s 14nm Technology in Detail article. Exciting times for CPUs.