For some time now I’ve been designing and developing some labs to replace the coming void that will be left by TechNet (please sign the petition!). My efforts have been focused on using VMware Fusion in conjunction with Vagrant and Packer. Both Vagrant and Packer are big deals in the DevOps communities due to the ability to quickly and easily destroy and create lab/dev environments. Due to the rapid rebuilds that can occur heavy automation is a must, and this is where Vagrant really shines.

If you work in an environment with lots of virtualised branches then at some point you are going to want to add VMware Update Manager (VUM) baselines to all or most of them. This is pretty easy to do with PowerCLI and the VUM snapin. If you want your baseline to apply to everything then I’d recommend you just attach the baseline to the vCenter object at the top of the tree.

If you are running a Dell EqualLogic SAN and are on an effected version then you need to lookout for this VMFS Heartbeat corruption issue with vSphere 5.5. The fix is to upgrade your SAN firmware. It appears there is also an issue with EMC VNXe SANs and iSCSI. This one only effects dual SP systems. I don’t have a direct link for this one but the EMC KB is 169041, Cormac Hogan has a few more details on his blog.

These are my thoughts of Cisco monitoring “software”. Just a heads up, all my thoughts are bad. I’ve been “using” (enduring?) Cisco software for quite some time now. There is a very good reason any network engineer worth their salt uses the command line and not the provided tools, they do terrible things to your configuration. But while software like the Security Device Manager (SDM) is bad and has been replaced by the slightly less bad Cisco Configuration Professional, there is a special place in purgatory reserved for Cisco LAN Management Suite (LMS).