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. The blog post is about SAS and the interaction with SATA. Interesting!
Posts for: #The Internet Fishing Trawler
The Internet Fishing Trawler: Grab Bag Edition
- 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. My preference would be in-line mode as make troubleshooting issues nicer, something which should be taken into account in all designs.
- Another awesome looking tool for those of you who use System Center Orchestrator, the “Orchestrator Visio and Word Generator” tool. Pretty cool and much better than static documentation. I’m sure I’ll get around at some point to writing a rant on how documentation is done all wrong but for now I believe tools like these should exist for all systems.
- I’m a huge fan of Security Onion, an Ubuntu based distribution that bundles some of the best security tools out there into an easy to use (for a security product) package. I honestly think everyone should be running this somewhere, the logging information that it is able to obtain is awesome. To see the power have a read of this SANS ISC blog post by the (or one of the) creators of Security Onion, Doug Burks.
- This is less hard tech but something I found interesting. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (also StackExchange, and many others, fame) asks a very good question, why does battery life on Windows devices suck? Honestly I moved to Mac (and OSX) in 2011 and haven’t looked back. I really find I’m not missing anything from Windows though I do miss PowerShell and the VIClient (going anyway so it doesn’t matter). PowerShell I can live without day to day and it helps to keep me sharp in more than one language, but some things are much nicer in OSX than in Windows. Just my experience.
The Internet Fishing Trawler: Monitoring Edition
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. There are a couple of new features in the new agent but nothing earth shattering, to me. Marnix Wolf has the breakdown and a great side by side comparison chart.
The Internet Fishing Trawler: Networking edition
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.
The Internet Fishing Trawler: vSphere vSphere vSphere Edition
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. My take is that vCHS is targeted at enterprises and Azure is for public cloud, wannabe AWS. The differences in how you buy the services really highlight this for me.