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.

I tend to rebuild my lab vCenter pretty often and now that I use the Nexus 1000v I think these awesome notes from Vallard at Vallard’s Tech Notes on how to reconnect to an orphaned n1kv will come in handy. Definitely one to keep around.

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. Such is life I guess.

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. I find posts on the business options that these products represent to be interesting, it is a bit of a dynamic time in storage!

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. Most software comes with sane defaults these days, going around and changing random things may not be a good idea.

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. Because VSAN doesn’t use SCSI-2 reservations, ESXi wasn’t to happy about installing. I wonder if there are any other OSes where this could be an issue?