Ahh the Christmas break. The perfect time for good food, enjoying the company of family and friends and of course.... IT projects at home! My project last year was to immerse myself in the source code for OpenBSD's snmp daemon so that I could integrate my patch-set for Net-SNMP directly into the native OpenBSD daemon. That was time well spent as I was able to integrate my code in the following weeks. This year I have maintenance to do in the home lab. It looks like 2013 is going to be a busy year as far as getting my hands on new stuff so I want the lab ready to rock.

First project: upgrade my VMware ESXi server from 4.1 to 5.1.

I read an excellent blog post by Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) this week on Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) titled "What is SR-IOV?". It's an older post but it did a great job of solidifying my understanding and filling in the knowledge gaps. One thing that stuck out was this bit: SR-IOV requires support in the BIOS as well as in the operating system instance or hypervisor that is running on the hardware.