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.

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.

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.

So you’re starting to get the hang of this PowerShell stuff and are able to pull off your own fancy tricks with the builtin cmdlets, but you need more! You want to be able to do things like create computer accounts, get VMware host information or turn on Cisco UCS and HP blades, cool stuff! Well, there is a way and that way is PowerShell modules. PowerShell modules come in two types, script modules (.

This is going to be a bit of a different “The Internet Fishing Trawler” post in that I’ve seen quite a few interesting looking Microsoft KBs crop up on their RSS feeds lately. So for this edition I’ll just be presenting each KB, you can have a bit of a look at any that may apply to your environment. Good luck! Unsupported Sysprep scenarios FIX: More than 1,000 rules in the NRPT causes no rules to be loaded into memory in Windows SCOM 2012 or SCOM 2007 R2 throws a “Heartbeat Failure” message and then goes into a greyed out state in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Data Deduplication garbage collection job does not work as expected in Windows Server 2012 FIX: TCP connections that use ephemeral loopback addresses are dropped suddenly in Windows Data loss occurs when a Windows Server 2012-based computer that has the data deduplication feature enabled crashes Issues when a physical disk encounters an error in a Windows Server 2012-based environment Error message when you try to schedule a shadow copy task in Windows Server 2012 Microsoft security advisory: Vulnerability in DirectAccess could allow security feature bypass

John Herbert over at Lame Journal has an interesting post asking what network engineers will be doing in five years time. For all the worry about automation there will still be people pressing buttons, just fewer of them. This might be a problem if you view IT as a job and not a career. Chuck Hollis has a bit of background on VMware+OpenStack. I think it is all pretty cool and if you have a spare 45 minutes I’d really recommend doing the Project NEE (VMware HOL) OpenStack lab.

Contrary to popular belief, VMware does work well with OpenStack and the VOVA is proof of that partnership. Basically an OpenStack controller in a virtual appliance. This is something I’d really like to see VMware provide support for, but I guess they will have to port it to SLES.

Ah management devices, the soft underbelly of your infrastructure. The good people over at Rapid7 have been doing some analysis of the IPMI implementation in SuperMicro servers and have found a few things. There will be some Metasploit modules released. While SuperMicro is the target here, if you watch your favourite hardware vendor’s announcements you will see this is something they all struggle with. There is a Microsoft Graphics Component vulnerability doing the rounds as of late.

This idea comes from one of the awesome engineers I work with, Chris Tester. We’ve recently updated our laptops to Windows 8.1 and Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have removed the old Windows Experience Index page. Not that WEI was anything fantastic but it did give a nice easy way to compare computers without having to go through installing a third-party testing package. I can only speculate that they thought it would be a bad idea to show this on tablets?

Cisco have announced their Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) initiative. Over at the Cisco Data Center and Cloud blog they have a post that details where it fits into their overall strategy. Still at the Data Center and Cloud blog there is another post that details some of the partners that Cisco have lined up for ACI. I’m guessing these are all companies that don’t compete with Cisco directly (e.g. now that ACE is dead f5 are free to partner).