Accumulated in my Inbox during the second half of July:

Virtualization

Duncan Epping wrote a long series of posts describing the new VMware’s High Availability implementation: Fault domain manager, Primary nodes, Datastore heartbeating, Restarting VMs and finally Advanced settings.

Jason Nash wrote a nice overview of various vShield products.

From Scale Up to Scale Down – a bit older but still extremely relevant article from Massimo Re Ferre (more so with after the vTax launch).

Data centers

Derick Winkworth is even more enthusiastic about MPLS support on NX-OS than I am.

Joe Onisick argues that FCoE standards and interoperability matter. I totally agree with him, but still feel a bit like this gentleman.

Yandy Ramirez made an interesting discovery: bridge assurance doesn’t work on vPC-based port channels as only one Nexus in the vPC pair receives incoming STP BPDUs.

Yet another article on Cisco and merchant silicon from the Twilight in the valley of nerds.

Seems like we are about to have an open networking trilogy: OpenStack has joined OpenFlow and Open vSwitch.

Web 2.0 killed the middleware star - Lori MacVittie describes why the middleware is no longer as relevant as it’s been a decade ago.

IP routing

Chris Marget wrote a nice article describing how asynchronous convergence in different OSPF areas can impact the network.

Security

I usually say that those that don’t know history tend to repeat old mistakes (resurrection of large-scale bridging comes to mind); Robert Graham has a similar (but slightly different) perspective – those that don’t know the state of the art will reinvent the wheel. I know absolutely nothing about IDS/IPS technology, but he also seems to imply HP TippingPoint is not really the shining star HP is claiming it to be.

Other

How software companies die. Published in 1995 but still relevant.

Chuck Hollis is expanding his topics – this time into economy. Interesting reading.

RFC 6305 – I’m being attacked by PRISONER.IANA.ORG. The lapses some people make are astounding. This RFC deals with those that try to map internal RFC 1918 addresses to hostnames using public DNS servers.