Damien Flynn has a good article on Petri about using System Centre Update Publisher (SCUP) to deploy the SCCM client with WSUS. Damien Flynn follows up with part two of expanding WSUS. Kristian Nese has a useful blog post on how to deploy SOFS using SCVMM. Lai Yoong Seng has a post about creating a Linux VM template for Hyper-V. This is a handy one, if you’ve noticed the difference between Task Manager on Windows 8 vs Server 2012 with missing disk graphs then Hans Vredevoort has the details on how to bring them back.

Chris M Evans over at ArchitectingIT has a good post on why he doesn’t want to see a ten year old flash array. I honestly don’t think to many organisations really keep ancient arrays around as their primary storage array, the support costs alone would be astronomical. Speaking of flash, the VMware vSphere blog has a useful post on VSAN hardware guidance with SSDs. I’ve linked to the first part in the series.

With all the brouhaha about VSAN (and I admit I’m looking very hard at it and how much it would cost to get a nice home lab setup) the requirement for one SSD per disk group should show the importance of SSD reliability. If you plan on using consumer grade SSDs or SSDs not from your hardware OEM (and even then) you are going to want to test them, hard.

Jeff Wouters has a handy script to find empty Active Directory groups. Another good one from Jeff Wouters, this time to find the users in the “authoritative groups”. I believe the authoritative groups Jeff is referencing are the BUILTIN groups. If you are looking to play tricks on your coworkers or have a legitimate reason to eject the CD-ROM drive, PowerShell Magazine have you covered. Jeffery Hicks at The Lonely Administrator has posted the PowerShell scripts he uses to clean out his TEMP files.

One to look out for those of you with IIS based websites, Update decreases the page load time of web sites that are hosted on Windows 7-based and Windows Server 2008 R2-based web servers. I’m sure we’ve all see the trust relationship error with Windows computers however KB 2914472 details that this can be caused by an IIS issue. A hotfix is referenced. For you Hyper-V and SCOM users (though I suppose if you use Hyper-V you have to use SCOM) there is a new version of the Hyper-V Management Pack Extensions for R2.

For all you SOE creators out there, you might find this post from Henk Hoogendoorn useful as he provides links to driver packages from Dell, HP and Lenovo. Should come in quite handy if you are using MDT/SCCM. I’ve been fighting with UEFI and WDS as of late so I know the pain of trying to get it going. If you are working with a device with no KVM you might want to look out for this bug with WDS 2012, UEFI-based computers cannot start because the WDS PXE program requires you to press F12.

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.

I’m very happy to see that vCAC 6.0 is out and it looks much nicer to install now, being a vApp and all. I’d recommend have a read of the release notes on the VMware website. When I get a chance I hope to put it through its paces in my lab. Over at ElasticSkies there is a good blog post on the new release detailing the new features. I was surprised by the number of hypervisors supported by vCAC 6.

In a pure example of the power of software-defined-whatever, over at Mauveweb there is a great blog post on unit testing load balancer configurations with Honeyd. Fantastic idea! A great post by AirBnB on their “SmartStack” service discovery software they have written to support their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I really like these posts as they give a great insight into how other people are designing their systems. Alan Renouf over at Virtu-Al has a blog series called “Top 10 Automation Tips”.

A bit of a troubling VMware KB, it seems E1000 adapters can cause a purple screen of death (PSOD). The remediation is to either use VMXNET3 adapters or disable RSS inside the VMs. I’ve tried to move away from E1000 to VMXNET3 but this is still one to watch out for. A Microsoft one this time, there is a potential for data loss when using SCSI disks with 2012 failover clustering in specific scenarios.