Cisco Nexus 1000v Free
In early October Cisco announced a bit of a pricing change and deployment model to their Nexus 1000v virtual switch appliance. And by a bit of a pricing change I mean FREE! The new packaging model includes an advanced edition as well as the newly announced free essentials edition (blog post here). In all cases I’ve read that it is free * – the asterisk meaning there is a nominal support fee (whatever that means). All in all, support fee or not I think it’s a good move by Cisco to help get the 1000v some more exposure into the community and help generate some more buzz around the network giants flagship virtual swtich.
Import-Module ItsCrazyWhatACommunityCanDoTogether
All I can say about this is Wow!!! David Muegge with some help from Henri Hamalainen has developed some awesome PowerShell cmdlets and packaged them into a nice little module you can download. What does this module do? Well, check out his blog post here but in a nutshell it queries a ton of stats and performance metrics on your EMC VNXe and presents them into some nice little graphs for you. I can’t wait to give these a go! Great work David and Henri!!!
Steve Herrod rocks a #vBrownbag
All I can say is wow! Ive been attending the vBrownbags for quite sometime now and seen a fair share of rockstars drop quite a bit of knowledge on them but having Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware present certainly takes the cake. Steve came on to speak briefly about certification and what it means to VMware, the software defined datacentre, and how technologies such as vSphere 5.1 provide the building blocks for the infrastructure that powers it. Although he did have an agenda he left quite a bit of time for open topics which resulted in great conversation around Nicira, Openstack, hands on labs platforms, VMworld locations, Horizon Suite, and more and more and more. 
The vbrownbag audience certainly took advantage of having someone with some answers in the goto presenter role. First off big thanks to Steve fore taking the time to come on, its amazing to see how VMware as a company, even c level execs care about the community that has formed around them. Secondly, big big thanks to the vBrownbag crew (Cody Bunch, Josh Atwell, Damian Karlson, Alistair Cook, Nick Marshall) for putting out soooo much great content week after week. If you have yet to check out the vBrownbag make sure you do, there is awesome certification series on there and a slew of VCDX presenters coming up
