SpongeBob Reading Official Rules Advanced Edition

More Blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing

My Firefox tabs have filled up again, some of these tabs have been open since the start of 2014!!!

So time to share!!!

First off, proud to announce that Cisco asked me to produce a blog post, and decided it was good enough to release into the wild on their site!!!

Get Certified, or get left behind!!!!

PowerShell and Scripting

http://explainshell.com/ – write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument

scriptcop.start-automating.com – ScriptCop is a tool to help make sure your scripts follow the rules. ScriptCop performs static analysis on your PowerShell, and provides tools for automating testing with PowerShell.

www.packer.io – Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is lightweight, runs on every major operating system, and is highly performant, creating machine images for multiple platforms in parallel. Packer does not replace configuration management like Chef or Puppet. In fact, when building images, Packer is able to use tools like Chef or Puppet to install software onto the image.

Veeam – Learn Powershell – From Basics To A Coding Star. With the release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft’s PowerShell has moved toward automation. Our courses are designed to help you become familiar with the powerful PS scripts.

Cisco ACI – Some Lesser known features – A short post on using ACI by guest blogger Charles Galler Jr

Create a webserver quickly with Powershell – This could be used for basic VM testing in lab environments, maybe a bit of failover/load balancing testing with NSX???

Networking

ASA NAT 8.3+ – NAT Operation and Configuration Format (CLI) – A good oldie, learning the difference of creating NAT rules between pre 8.3 IOS and post 8.3 IOS

Cisco ASA 8.3 / 8.4 NAT Guide (simple yet practical overview) – Another on the same subject

Learn subnetting quickly – Quick and Easy Subnetting on Routing, Switching and Network Design RelationshipIP Subnetting made easy

OSPF Filtering using distributed list with Prefix-List – Found this example whilst on my CCNP Course

Cisco – Route Filtering with OPSF in IPv4 – an older pdf document created by Cisco

Aaron’s Worthless Words – Found whilst under taking my CCNP Study, some good posts on here around the CCNP topics.

VMware

David Seaman – vSphere ToolKit – Not personally used this, but everyone knows the pains of SSLs and VMware components, and after a bit of reading, it seems like David has made some good progress to help us eradicate these burdens.

Crucial data in your VMware ESXi 5 log files – A great small post I usually pass onto customers that want to understand their environment better and do some troubleshooting themselves.

Real World VDI Performance – A nice post on using LoginVSI to simulate real user workloads on a Nimble Storage Device.

Virtual SAN / EVO:Rail – Use Cases versus Supported – wrote by everyones favourite community come VMware guy, Duncan Epping

Simplivity and Cisco announce partnership with UCS combination – Interesting move and something I’d love to see in production

Deep Dive – How does the NSX vSwitch work – Some nice litte diagrams and digestable information for my current favourite subject.

PowerActions for vSphere Web Client – PowerActions integrates the vSphere Web Client and PowerCLI to provide complex automation solutions from within the standard vSphere management client.

Troubleshooting VMware HA isolation response – Another golden oldie, this time by Scott Lowe

PowerCLI – Gathering VMHost NIC Driver info – There’s nothing worse than having inconsistencies in a VMware cluster. This includes patch level, driver level and definitely firmware levels. In this particular case, the focus is on the physical network adapters

Memory tuning of VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) – When you deploy a VMware vCenter Server Appliance it comes configured with a standard of 8 GB Memory. For a lot of smaller environments this is too much and you can re-configure the JVM heap size for the vCenter Server processes and therefore consume less memory.

PowerCLI – Setting up vSwitches and Port Groups – Always handy to have, personally I think you can automate pretty much all of the VMware install of a new environment.

Josh Odgers – vSphere Cluster sizing calculator – Says it all really, I’ve had a quick play around with it, but plan to put it to actual use on my next customer design.

Distributed vSwitches and vCenter outage, whats the deal? – Something a customer was querying with me the other month, so was a pleasure to point them in this direction where it was actually testing the failure of vCenter, rather than me reciting the theory.

Horizon View 6.0 – Creating a Windows Golden Image (Template) – Something that always interests me are peoples tricks and tips on creating that “perfect” template.

Microsoft

Exchange 2013 Migration – All you need – This Curah will explain all you need for the Exchange 2013 Migration

Other / Misc

Forklift upgrades – something I do every day, I stumbled on this article on twitter, and I like the fact it explains the nimble scale out scale up architecture.
Break the Cycle: How a CIO Shift to Strategic Management can Eliminate IT Hero and Firefighter Mentality – Something a little different, and clearly not an area I work in, but a good read all the same

The only 3 things you really need to know about Cisco UCS – A nice small blog, going on about some highlight features of UCS, I found this when I was looking for short snippets of information to relay within a tender document.

Veeam – Restore Point Simulator – Not really seen a tool about like this before, I will test it on existing environments and report back,.

 

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