Networking

I recently sat and passed the VCP6-NV exam, and I figured since I spent a lot of time reading about other people’s exam experience, I would share mine as well. An important note is that there are two versions of this exam (as of this writing). The older exam is based on NSX 6 and was retired on April 30, 2017. This is noteworthy because a lot of the study material out there is based on the older exam. The general consensus online seems to be that it won’t hurt to review it, but if newer material is available, you might as well use that. ...

With 2017 behind us, I found myself doing some reflecting on the tech industry. In particular I found myself looking back at some of the trends I saw at Tech Field Day 14 & 15, which were about 6 months apart. As it turns out, it was interesting to see some small signs of change in May, and then see additional and more prevalent changes in September. CONTAINERS & THE DEVOPS MOVEMENT There is no doubt that the use of containers continued to grow in 2017. We saw more and more announcements around products, as well as what seemed to be a larger adoption in use. Some recent buzz in the industry was created when Red Hat announced its intent to acquire CoreOS. Although we saw this announcement in 2018, it builds on the direction from 2017. ...

The first Steelhead appliance ever sold. Riverbed is synonymous with WAN acceleration, and rightly so. The company has been doing this, and doing it well, for a number of years now. As a little bit of trivia, the first Steelhead server was sold in 2004 to Environment Canada. But with so much of the world going mobile-first, Riverbed intends to keep serving their customers. There are a number of wireless AP vendors out there, so what characteristics make Riverbed’s Xirrus attractive? ...

Disaster Recovery is something that can be critical to every business, but not every business has a good DR plan. Heck, I would be willing to bet that a lot of SMBs don’t even have a plan that is made up of much more than “fix the problem”. A large reason for this is designing a good, versatile DR environment is not cheap. Not every organization has the money to lay out for equipment, facilities, maintenance, etc. ...

As some of you may recall, there was a little bit of a hub bub recently regarding ‘Making VMUG Great Again’; the crux of the issue came down to getting users more involved, particularly on the presenting side. You can read my thoughts on it here, along with some comments that folks left. Shortly after publishing that post I was contacted by an organizer for the upcoming VMUG Virtual Event and was invited to present a short community session. Well, it was time to put my money where my mouth was, so I accepted (along with the fact that I saw I was listed on the schedule). Side Note: Feel free to join me Tuesday, May 17th at 4:00 CT for my session: Make Your Backups Work For You. ...

I recently found myself in the midst of having to setup some VLANs from scratch in an environment that was a hodgepodge of switches. The terms alone between vendors can drive you mad (e.g. access mode vs untagged, dot1q trunk vs. tagged, etc.) Long story short, we got the switches down to either Cisco Catalysts or Cisco Small Business switches. After hopping between switch models enough times, the commands would just get muddled up in my head. Finally, after the umpteenth typo, I made some cheat sheets for myself as I found I was issuing the same commands over and over, but depending on the switch product line, it was slightly different. ...