Technology Short Take #78
Published on 17 Feb 2017 · Filed in Information · 772 words (estimated 4 minutes to read)Welcome to Technology Short Take #78! Here’s another collection of links and articles from around the Internet discussing various data center-focused technologies.
Networking
- The rise of the disaggregated network operating system (NOS) marches on: this time, it’s Big Switch Networks announcing expanded hardware support in Open Network Linux (ONL), upon which its own NOS is based.
- The Pivotal Engineering blog has an article that shows how to use BOSH with the vSphere CPI to automate adding servers to an NSX load balancing pool.
- Mircea Ulinic has a nice article describing the combination of NAPALM and Salt for network automation.
- Here’s a post by Ron Fuller on changing the IP address of NSX Manager.
Servers/Hardware
Nothing this time around, sorry!
Security
- As part of some research around my Linux migration, I came across this write-up on how to do encrypted instant messaging on OS X with Adium and Off the Record (OTR). I’ve been using OTR with Adium for a while so this wasn’t new to me, but I wanted to share it here for others who may not be familiar with the solution. (I use OTR with Adium on OS X, and OTR with Pidgin on my Fedora Linux laptop.)
- Along the same lines as the previous bullet, here’s a write-up on how to encrypt your e-mails with PGP keys. Now, PGP keys have been around forever, but the cool part (IMO) about this write-up is integrating Keybase (and PGP keys generated in Keybase) into the process.
- Docker Inc. (the company) has recently announced they’ve added secrets management into Docker Datacenter. The New Stack has a decent analysis of this latest move and the potential impact it will have on the container ecosystem.
- Humair Ahmed takes a closer look at some Cross-VC NSX security enhancements that landed in the recent NSX 6.3 release.
- This is an older article, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before now. This article discusses the virtual machine introspection (VMI) functionality introduced in XenServer 7 while illustrating the value of hypervisor-based security controls.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- Ryan Kelly has a whole collection of posts about the Puppet plugin for vRealize Automation (vRealize Orchestrator, actually). First, he shares how to install and configure the Puppet plugin for vRealize Automation. This enables you to automatically install the Puppet agent and make it active when you deploy a VM via vRealize Automation. (More information on the Puppet plugin is available here.) Next, Ryan shares how to integrate the Puppet plugin into vRA blueprints. Finally, he has a couple of troubleshooting articles, one on a potential gotcha when upgrading the plugin and another when getting an error on workflows. There’s lots of good information here.
- Adrian Roberts shares a walkthrough of running Photon OS and VMware Admiral in a vCloud Air Network environment.
- How about a new Clarity-based interface for vRA 7.2? Check this out. (Note: This is totally unsupported. You’ve been warned.)
Operating Systems/Applications
- Daniel Allen Deutsch extolls the benefits of learning to use tmux properly.
- Here’s a piece by Carla Schroder on third-party repositories for CentOS.
- I mentioned Flatpak (in the last Technology Short Take, I believe) recently. Here’s a note mentioning that new Firefox builds and the Telegram client are available via Flatpak.
- Kudos to GitLab for their detailed and transparent post-mortem of the recent database outage. There are lots of lessons that can be learned from this information.
Storage
- Anthony Spiteri discusses an issue he saw with his new SuperMicro-based home lab; apparently there’s a problem with the native VMware driver that causes slow performance.
- Cormac Hogan has a brief update on storage options for containers on VMware.
- Check out Aaron Patten’s article on vRA + SPBM (storage policy-based management) with VVols.
Virtualization
- Via one of the OpenStack mailing lists, I saw a reference this article article by CERN regarding their use of NUMA and CPU pinning for high-throughput workloads. While discussed in an OpenStack context, the focus of the article is more on KVM’s functionality.
- Here’s another virtualization-focused article written in the context of an OpenStack environment, this time focusing on performance comparisons between Hyper-V and KVM.
- William Lam has an update on the 7th-generation Intel NUC and ESXi 6.x. Check it out if you’re considering the latest Intel NUC for your home lab.
Career/Soft Skills
- Communicating effectively is an important skill, and communicating effectively via e-mail is an especially important skill. Check out this HBR article on making sure your e-mails give the right impression. (Thanks to Jonathan Gershater for the link.)
That’s all for this time, folks. Hopefully something I included here was useful to you, or made you think. Have a great weekend!