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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.