It seems that the blade server market grew at a nice clip in Q3 according to IDC as reported by Kevin Houston at Blades Made Simple. I wonder how long this will continue? With VSAN and associated technologies, blades don’t really make sense to me. Maybe they won’t be as big a deal as they are made out to be? I’ve been working a lot with Microsoft Word lately and quite frankly I hate it.

Over at Network Janitor, Kurt Bales has a fantastic blog post on the “py-junos-eznc” Python library. It uses NETCONF for communication. Not everything out there uses REST APIs it seems… Speaking of programming, Cisco have announced their GitHub repo for the new Nexus 9k series. Well worth the look and I look forward to seeing it build out over time. Still at Cisco, the “Data Center and Cloud” blog has a post on Cisco Prime Data Center Network Manager (DCNM).

Brian Madden has a great post on Windows desktop management. I’d argue that the utility of “curating” a Windows environment is no where near what it once was. Do we really care that all users have the same background or that the notification area shows all icons? I doubt it. Perhaps we need to quantify the cost of all these configuration elements? Now that would be interesting! The VMware PowerCLI blog has a good post on how to use the tagging feature with PowerCLI.

For those using Nested ESXi, Andreas Peetz over at VMware Front Experience shows how you can use his great tool to turn the ESXi VMware Tools into a package suitable to put inside the installer. I’ve requested that they consider releasing the VIB as a bundle to make it even easier. Jonathan Medd has a blog post with his Puppet module “skeleton” creator using PowerShell. Even if you aren’t interested in Puppet you might enjoy reading some PowerShell.

Thanks to Vladan Seget over at Vladan.fr there are some cool new posters to hang on your wall. Poster one is [Hyper-V 2012 R2 architecture] (http://www.vladan.fr/windows-server-hyper-v-2012-r2-poster/) and poster two is [vSphere 5 memory management and monitoring] (http://www.vladan.fr/vmware-vsphere-5-memory-management-and-monitoring-poster/). This is quite the head scratcher for you SMB folks, when you get the Silver level competency you lose the ability to log business critical tickets. This seems like yet another salvo in Microsoft’s war on SMBs to me… In potentially interesting future developments news, Seagate have come out with their Kinetic Open Storage Vision.

How are those Windows XP migration projects coming along? Well I hope! A new 0-day is out for XP and it hits you right in the kernel. SANS has all the links and details for this one. If you use SCOM 2012 R2 and Dell devices there is a new management pack out now. You will want to head on over to the Dell TechCenter to see all the little goodies.

While it is all fun and games to laugh at Azure going down taking a whole bunch of public Microsoft websites with it, it also serves as a timely reminder that the “cloud” isn’t some magical beast that has 100% uptime just because there are lots of data centres scattered across the world. Monitoring your off premise availability is just as important as monitoring on premise. Perhaps this is the “Kondratiev wave” of IT, marketing convinces people that the new shiny doesn’t need any of the old ways, tech gets implemented to the suffering of the users/business, new shiny gets operationalised enough for the “old ways” to be implemented again.

So the day has finally arrived where EMC have released the XtremeIO storage array. Josh Nash has a great blog post on what makes up an XtremeIO system. If you only read one post I’d recommend this one to get you up to speed on the XtremeIO. But it wasn’t all sunshine and unicorns for EMC, as this blog post over at ArchitectingIT will attest. Robin Harris at StorageMojo has his own take on the launch.

For those of you who require some kind of Microsoft guidance to make a decision I have a gift for you. Microsoft recommend not using RC4 and SHA-1. Honestly in this day and age if you are using RC4 I would be very worried. Over at TechNet Magazine there is a (semi) interesting post on not touching things that shouldn’t be touched, e.g magic registry keys. Honestly I found it a bit long winded and would have preferred some technical examples but the general idea is there and one I support.

For all you Microsoft admins out there, Redmond has release free ebook on Windows Server 2012 R2. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet but it is free! Citrix have announced their EOL dates for the Citrix Web Interface products. Get the dates and a Doctor Evil picture over at the vCloudinfo blog. William Lam over at virtuallyGhetto has another great blog post on getting nested ESXi (vInception) running on top of the new VSAN.