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. A hotfix is provided.

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.

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 6.0, I wonder how many people really run multi-hypervisor environments?

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”. I’ve linked to tip three, “It’s all about people”, because it really is all about the people. I think this is especially true if you work in a normal organisation and not one of those young start-ups or cloud providers. The requirements for successful automation go well beyond just the technical.

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. The fix is included in an update rollup so you might want to take a second look at what is included.