Moving a small on-prem environment to Azure/ O365 – Part 2

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A couple of days ago, I wrote about our first steps to move our on-prem stuff to Azure. This post will cover how we adopted Office 365 and how we have started with our Azure deployment.

Our first step into Office 365 was Microsoft Teams. We needed a solution for calls (audio/ video) and chat. We skipped Skype 4 Business and started with Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft 2020 (c)

Our Microsoft Teams deployment was pretty simple: We used our Microsoft IUR Office 365 E3 plans. Microsoft Azure AD Connect was quickly deployed and the Microsoft Exchange Hybrid Connection Wizard did the rest. Some weeks later we deployed ADFS/ ADFS Proxy.… Read more

Exchange Control Panel /ecp broken after certificate replacement

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As part of an ongoing Exchange 2010 to 2016 migration, I had to replace the self-signed certificate with a certificate from the customers PKI. Everything went fine, the customer had a suitable template, we’ve added the necessary hostnames and bound IIS and SMTP to the certificate. The mess started with an iisreset /noforce…

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The iisreset took longer than expected. After that, I tried to login into the ECP, entered username and password and got an error.

<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"<System<Provider Name="MSExchange Front End HTTP Proxy" /<EventID Qualifiers="49152"1003</EventID<Level2</Level<Task1</Task<Keywords0x80000000000000</Keywords<TimeCreated SystemTime="2020-10-22T12:16:38.934123400Z" /<EventRecordID368718</EventRecordID<ChannelApplication</Channel<Computerserver.domain.tld</Computer
… Read more

Moving a small on-prem environment to Azure/ O365 – Part 1

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It was a bit quiet here due to the current COVID 19 pandemic. But now I’m back with a pretty interesting story on how my colleagues and I moved most of our on-prem server stuff to Microsoft Azure and Office 365.

Microsoft 2020 (c)

It all started with the COVID19 lockdown in Germany in March 2020. We moved into our home offices after setting up a small VMware Horizon View deployment to access our PCs using physical View Agents and manual desktop pools. Most projects were stopped, and we did most of our work remote. No lay-offs or short-time work.

We were running a small VMware vSphere cluster for a couple of years.… Read more

Virtually reseated: Reset blade in a HPE C7000 enclosure

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After a reboot, a VMware ESXi 6.7 U3 told me that he has no compatible NICs. Fun fact: Right before the reboot everything was fine.

The ILO also showed no NICs. Unfortunately, I wasn’t onsite to pull the blade server and put it back in. But there is a way to do this “virtually”.

You have to connect to the IP address of the Onboard Administrator via SSH. Then issue the reset server command with the bay of the server you want to reset and an argument.

OA1-C7000reset server 13

WARNING: Resetting the server trips its E-Fuse. This causes all power to be momentarily removed from the server. This command should only be used when physical access to the server is unavailable, and the server must be removed and
reinserted.
… Read more

Update Manager fails with unknown error during host remediation

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During an vSphere 6.5 6.7 update a was host failing continously at the remediation with an “unknown error”. The host was updated from ESXI 6.5 to 6.7 using an upgrade baseline. Other hosts were updated to 6.7 and with the latest patches without any issues. Something strange was going on…

The esxupdate.log and the vua.log on the host itself showed nothing special. So I checked the vmware-vum-server-log4cpp.log which was much more informative!

[2020-07-19 13:03:25:217 'SingleHostScanTask.SingleHostScanTask{262}' 139762329831168 ERROR] [singleHostScanTask, 693] caught an odbc error: "ODBC error: (23505) - ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "pk_vci_scanresults"; Error while executing the query" is returned when executing SQL statement "INSERT INTO VCI_SCANRESULTS(endtime, id, scan_status, scan_type, starttime, target_component, target_uid) VALUES (?,
… Read more

Access to on-premise hosted Public Folders using Exchange Online mailboxes

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Public Folders are still a thing. And while companies are moving their stuff into the cloud, Public Folders still need to be accessed by cloud-located mailboxes.

Allowing the access from Exchange Online mailboxes to on-premise hosted Public Folders is well documented by Microsoft, but there are also some fuzz. I had to deal with this during a Office 365 transition project at one of my customers.

The background

The customer is running a single Exchange 2016 server in a Windows Server 2012 R2 forest. AzureAD Sync is running and its syncing on-premise identities to AzureAD. The customer uses Office 365 E5 plans and he wants to move to Exchange Online, aside other O365 services like SharePoint Online, Teams etc.… Read more

Office365/ Exchange OAuth errors after replacing TLS certificate

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A customer of mine asked for help to analyse a weird OAuth error. They are using a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Outlook plugin, which came up with an error:

“Can’t connect to Exchange”

In addition to this, they also faced an issueaccessing shared calendars of Exchange Online mailboxes.

Clearly an OAuth error. So we ran the Hybrid Connection Wizard again, which finished without any errors. But the errors persisted. Next stop: OAuth configuration.

We logged into one of the Exchange servers, started an Exchange Management Shell and checked the current OAuth configuration:

[PS] C:\Windows\system32Get-AuthConfig
RunspaceId : e7c560cd-8316-4d9c-b97d-f4358d665e7d
CurrentCertificateThumbprint : CA420022ACC542D3AF7598456615715E98FFE986
PreviousCertificateThumbprint : E7B56BEAF4704BCBBF8C297F1D8D000215679C6F
NextCertificateThumbprint :
NextCertificateEffectiveDate :
ServiceName : 00000002-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000
Realm :
DeploymentId :
IssuerIdentifier :
Name : Auth Configuration
AdminDisplayName :
ExchangeVersion : 0.20 (15.0.0.0)
DistinguishedName : CN=Auth Configuration,CN=EXORG,CN=Microsoft
Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=domain,DC=tld
Identity : Auth Configuration
Guid : 911b6246-6248-4278-91be-1b7b4943d2f1
ObjectCategory : mlnetwork.local/Configuration/Schema/ms-Exch-Auth-Auth-Config
… Read more

Once in a year: How to update TLS certificates on ADFS server and proxies

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You might got this news some days ago: Starting with September 1, 2020, browsers and devices from Apple, Google, and Mozilla will show errors for new TLS certificates that have a lifespan greater than 398 days. Due to this move from Apple, Google and Mozilla, you have to deal with the replacement of certificates much more often. And we all know: Replacing certificates can be a real PITA!

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Replacing TLS certificates used for ADFS and Office 365 can be a challenging task, and this blog post will cover the neccessary steps.

ADFS Server

The first service, for which we will replace the certificate, is the ADFS server, or the ADFS server farm.… Read more

Passed Microsoft exam AZ-103 – Azure Administrator Associate

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Six weeks ago, I passed the Microsoft AZ-103 exam and earned the Azure Administrator Associate. A last minute pass, because AZ-104 was already launched. But better late than never. I had to re-schedule the exam a couple of times because the test center was closed due to COVID19.

The Azure Administrator Associate is a Administrator-role certification and it is all about implementing, managing and monitoring the Azure identity, governance, storage, compute, and virtual network solutions.

The exam covers a couple of topics and you should have knowledge and hands-on experience in administering Azure services using the Azure Portal, PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Azure Resource Manager templates.… Read more

Fan health sensors report false alarms on HPE Gen10 Servers with ESXi 6.7

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I’ve got several mails and comments about this topic. It looks like that the latest ESXi 6.7 updates are causing some trouble on HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers.

I’ve blogged about recurring host hardware sensor state alarm messages some weeks ago. A customer noticed them after an update. Last week, I got the first comments under this blog post abot fan failure messages after applying the latest ESXi 6.7 updates. Then more and more customers asked me about this, because they got these messages too in their environment after applying the latest updates.

Last Saturday I tweeted my blog post to give a hint to my followers who may be experiencing the same problem.… Read more