• 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!

• 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.

Have you got a nice New-Alias setup you wish were available every time you opened PowerShell? How about a cool function you’ve written that you’d like to not have to import at the start of each session? Well the PowerShell profile is for you! This little text file will allow you to put pretty much any PowerShell command in it and have it run every time you open a new PowerShell window. Think of it is the Windows equivalent of a Linux .bash_profile or .zshrc.

• 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.

For the past few years at VMworld, rockstar PowerShell gurus Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens have given a presentation on PowerCLI. Before I’ve felt that they could go a bit deeper and in this presentation I think they have hit it right on the mark with the depth. Some pretty good tips makes this worth watching.

WARNING: This isn’t an intro to PowerCLI, if you don’t know what an object is or you are just starting out then this might be a bit overwhelming. I’m not sure why they ask people to leave if they are looking for an intro, if you’ve read a PowerShell script you can get a vague idea about what they are going on about. I’m a believer in immersing yourself so you might not understand but when you do get to that level you can think back and go, “ah, that is what they were on about!”. But that is just my learning style.