Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks has some thoughts that you should keep in mind for those of you looking at VSAN. I’ll be interested to see if things like VSAN swing people back to using rack instead of blade servers. Chris Siebenmann works in a very interesting environment (University EDU by the looks of it) where they build there own storage systems. While most organisations prefer to have low level details abstracted it seems to me that places like these are what help drive information into the public domain.

Interesting looking tool alert. If you’ve ever made a change to your public DNS records it can seem like an eternity for the changes to populate. DNSYO is a nifty little tool that will poll 500 DNS servers showing you the propagation of your records. Check it out! Over at Packet Pushers, Eric Flores has a good blog post on F5 deployment types. The post is designed for in-line mode but talks about the “load-balancer-on-a-stick” (as in router-on-a-stick) method and the advantages and disadvantages of that design choice.

At VMworld 2013 vCOps 5.8 was announced. There seem to be some pretty cool features in there. Eric Shanks at The IT Hollow has a great break down on the new features. By default you can’t really get data out of vCOps but there is a community PowerShell module to allow you to get the stats out. Brian Wuchner over at EnterpriseAdmins.org shows how to use it. Moving into the world of SCOM, 2012 R2 the venerable SCOM Agent is being renamed Microsoft Monitoring Agent.

Unless it is a major new launch or a brand new product line I tend not to really focus on the spec bump launches from Cisco. However the Cisco Datacenter Blog has an interesting post on the new Nexus 3100 series. The highlight of the post is the platform architecture white paper, those tend to be very useful. The super unfortunate part is that you cannot download it without handing over your details, bummer.

Is there a difference between vCPUs and the cores setting in a VM? Yes and no, from vSphere both are just logical data constructs but when looking at the physical side you need to take into account NUMA. The vSphere Blog has all the details and even some light benchmarking. Marcel Van Den Berg over at UP2V, who works with vSphere and Hyper-V, has a nice breakdown of the differences between vCHS and Azure.

If you are running a Dell EqualLogic SAN and are on an effected version then you need to lookout for this VMFS Heartbeat corruption issue with vSphere 5.5. The fix is to upgrade your SAN firmware. It appears there is also an issue with EMC VNXe SANs and iSCSI. This one only effects dual SP systems. I don’t have a direct link for this one but the EMC KB is 169041, Cormac Hogan has a few more details on his blog.