Why we need a vSAN licensing for SMB customers

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Not every customer is running a full-blown vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing. To be honest, when I look at the number of sold licenses, most of my customers are running vSphere Essentials Plus. Not Essentials, nor Standard or Enterprise (Plus), but two or three hosts with Essentials Plus. And that’s perfectly fine!

Two or three hosts with 10 GbE and pretty often 12G SAS. Some of them with Fibre-Channel, nearly no one with iSCSI. My colleagues and I developed a pretty rock solid setup over the last years, which we sell like some kind of building block: HPE ProLiant, HPE MSA, Aruba Switches, vSphere Essentials Plus.… Read more

VMware ESXi 6.7: Recurring host hardware sensor state alarm

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I had a really annoying problem at one of my customers. After deploying new VMware ESXi hosts (HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10) along with an upgrade of the vCenter Server Appliance to 6.7 U2, the customer reported recurring host hardware sensor state alarm messages in the vCenter for all hosts.

After acknowledging the alarm, it recurred after a couple of minutes or hours. The hardware was finde, no errors or warnings were noticed in the ILO Management Log. But the vCenter reported periodically a Sensor -1 type error in the Events window. The /var/log/syslog.log contained messages like this:

Sure, you can ignore this.… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.2 Map service dependencies

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This blog post covers objective 2.2 (Map service dependencies) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Evaluate dependencies for infrastructure and application services that will be included in a vSphere design
  • Create Entity Relationship Diagrams that map service relationships and dependencies
  • Analyze interfaces to be used with new and existing business processes
  • Determine service dependencies for logical components
  • Include service dependencies in a vSphere 6.x Logical Design
  • Analyze services to identify upstream and downstream service dependencies
  • Navigate logical components and their interdependencies and make decisions based upon all service relationships

Let’s start with the first topic of this objective.… Read more

Load balancing ADFS and ADFS Proxy using Citrix ADC

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Last week I had to setup a small Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) farm that will be used to allow Single Sign-On (SSO) with Office 365.

Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is a solution developed by Microsoft to provide users an authenticated access to applications, that are not capable of using Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA).

Required by the customer was a two node ADFS farm located on the internal network, and a two node ADFS Proxy farm located at the DMZ.

An ADFS Proxyserver acts as a reverse proxy and it is typically located in your organizations perimeter network (DMZ).… Read more

vCenter Migration from 6.0 to 6.7 fails due to missing user role

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Actually, yesterday should be the day at which I migrate one of the last physical Windows vCenter servers installed in my customer base. Actually… the migration failed twice. And each time I had to rollback, power-on the old physical server, reset the computer account etc.

The update was from VMware vCenter Server 6.0 Update 3d (7462484) on a Windows 2012 R2 server to vCenter Server 6.7 Update 3 (Appliance). The migration failed at 62% with the following message:

… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.1 Map business requirements to a vSphere 6.x logical design

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The last few weeks have been quite busy. Time to focus on exam preparation again. Let’s start with the first objective of the second section.

This blog post covers objective 2.1 (Map business requirements to a vSphere 6.x logical design) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Analyze requirements for functional and non-functional elements
  • Build non-functional requirements into a specific logical design
  • Translate stated business requirements into a logical design
  • Incorporate the current state of a customer environment into a logical design

Let’s start with

Analyze requirements for functional and non-functional elements

Functional and non-functional elements sounds familiar.… Read more

Supported Active Directory environments for Microsoft Exchange

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It is time for some words of wisdom, in regard to Exchange and the supported Active Directory environments. It is the same as with the supported. NET Framework releases: Latest release does not automatically mean “supported”.

To be honest: I nearly nuked a customer environment with ~ 300 users yesterday by preparing the domain for the first Windows Server 2019 Domain Controller.

First things first: Everything is fine! I did not prepared to forest schema for Windows Server 2019.

The support for Windows Server 2008 R2 comes to an end and some customers are still running it. Like my customer yesterday.… Read more

Microsoft Exchange 2013/ 2016/ 2019 shows blank ECP & OWA after changes to SSL certificates

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EDIT
This issue is described in KB2971270 and is fixed in Exchange 2013 CU6.

I published this blog post in July 2015 and it is still relevant. The feedback for this blog post was incredible, and I’m not joking when I say: I saved many admins weekends. ;) It has shown, that this error still occurs with Exchange 2016 and even 2019. Maybe not because of the same, with Exchange 2013 CU6 fixed bug, but maybe for other reasons. And the solution below still applies to it. Because of this I have decided to re-publish this blog post with a modified title and this little preamble.

Feel free to leave a comment if this blog post worked for you.… Read more

What’s new in Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1

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Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.

In December 2018, Vembu announced the fourth major release of their BDR Suite. Vembu BDR Suite 4.0.1 is now out for production setups with enhanced performance and bug fixes. Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1 is an intermediate patch update that addresses the customers reported issues and other support issues on the previous build of v4.0. Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1 also features a large number of enhancements and significant of those are listed below.… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 1.3 Determine risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions

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This blog post covers objective 1.3 (Determine risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions) of the VCAP6.5-DCV Design exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update August 2017).

The first objective of the exam prep guide has covered the business requirements. Now we have to do similar for the affected applications.

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Differentiate between the concepts of risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions
  • Given a statement, determine whether it is a risk, requirement, constraint, or an assumption
  • Analyze impact of VMware best practices to identified risks, constraints, and assumptions

Differentiate between the concepts of risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions

I wrote a couple of times about risks, requirements, constraints and assumptions, but I missed to explain the meaning of each of these terms.… Read more