• Good news everyone! F5 have dropped the price of their LTM VE lab editions to approx. USD$95. Here in Australia the going rate was about AUD$2000 so this represents a significant saving. With this price it is worth adding these VMs to your lab and I look forward to trying out NSX with these new VEs when I’m able to get ahold of NSX. I’ve bought two to test failover but I’m still waiting on my license keys. Unfortunately not all resellers have updated and the prices I have available in Australia are the old ones, however, Packet Pushers have a blog post on where to order it. The licenses are delivered digitally.

 

 

  • In other Christmas present news, VMware have released pyVmomi, the VMware SDK for Python. William Lam over at virtuallyGhetto has the great news.

 

  • Unfortunately even with all the cool Python stuff as of late I still haven’t had the chance to sit down and do some learning of the language. Thankfully Chris Wahl has a very useful post for those looking to learn. Lots of good information there!

 

  • I’ll be looking to update my lab environment sooner or later but part of the problem is the huge number of options available! Right when you think a particular design looks about right, you find another option which requires more thinking and planning. When looking at your storage design I’d really recommend reading a post by Chris Wahl on the various pros and cons of each storage option. For me I’ve decided to go with VSAN, the hard part is figuring out the hardware!