Hard to believe it but yes, people are still using Windows XP (it is pretty popular in industrial applications). The SANS ISC has a good post on why you should move away and some metrics on the Swiss cheese security of the OS. Sometimes I think Brian Madden lives in the cloud but his post on the use of storage quotas in modern enterprises really got me thinking about how end user perceptions of IT services really have changed.

Anthony Burke over at Cisco Inferno has a good blog post on what he believes the current state of play is with NSX. After reading it I have to agree. I believe that to reach any kind of scale we need tech like NSX. Overlays are here to stay. Scott Lowe has a great blog series on NSX (was NVP when it was Nicira) that I believe is a must read.

When PowerShell 3.0 was released one of the little “surprises” was that the help included in the download was a short stub. If you wanted the full help available in your PowerShell session then you need to use the cmdlet Update-Help. While i’ve now gotten over the shock (I’ve adapted to just using Google) it is still important to find out what is changing in the documentation. With that in mind I suggest you pop on down to Richard Siddaway’s blog and use the link provided to put into your RSS reader of choice.

New versions of the Dell iDRAC have a feature to auto-lock the OS when the last virtual console has disconnected. I think this is pretty useful and I’d like something like this inside VMware but it is obviously more important for physical servers. John Allspaw at the Kitchen Soap blog has a really great post on being a senior engineer. This is one of those articles that I think everyone should read.

Seems there is a bit of a change in the way mailbox sizes are calculated in Exchange 2013. You can read a good argument on why it isn’t a big issue from Tony at Windows IT Pro. To me it is only a non-issue if the numbers in Outlook match up. If users find they’ve suddenly lost quota they tend to get pretty annoyed! Having upgraded to Windows 8.1 it is very clear Microsoft want you to have a Microsoft Account.

I usually shy away from vendor battles as the technology should speak for itself but sometimes the FUD from vendors can be a bit much. Jamie Doherty at the Bits and Bytes blog takes down a recent HP video for OneView. Vendors shouldn’t purposefully misuse competitors products in a video on the *Internet,*it isn’t really a good look. Kevin Houston over at Blades Made Simple has a great comparison of the maximum number of 10GbE network cards for 2x socket servers in various blade vendors’ chassis.

This post is less of a tip and more of a general warning. As someone who does a fair bit of work with PowerShell, I’m always anxious to get my hands on the latest release. But this is a caution to really read the release notes as it turns out new PowerShell versions are quite incompatible with a fair few core Microsoft technologies (e.g. Exchange). This is very unfortunate and has been the case since PowerShell/WMF 3.

It seems Kaspersky Anti-Virus is identifying tcpip.sys as malware. How can this be happening in 2013? This issue has been going on since AV was introduced and yet there has been no movement. Very sad. Every time an AV issue like this one crops up I feel the need to post this article by the SANS Computer Forensics blog. I feel that at this point AV simply checks a box and provides no real protection against anything but the lowest and most common threats.

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.