WatchGuard Network Security Essentials Exam

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Yesterday, I passed the first exam of the year. In this case the WatchGuards Network Security Essentials exam. The exam covers basic networking and firewalling skills, as well as the necessary knowledge to configure, manage, and monitor a WatchGuard Firebox. If you were familier with networking and firewalls in general, this exam is a “low hanging fruit”. I had to take it due to partner conditions.

WatchGuards offers a pretty good study guide for this exam which you can get for free.. The exam is delivered by  Kryterion and can be taken in a test center or as online proctored exam.

The closed book exam consists of 70 questions.… Read more

VCAP-DCV Design 2021 – Objective 1.1 Gather and analyze business requirements

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This blog post covers objective 1.1 (Gather and analyze business requirements) of the VCAP-DCV Design 2021 exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update December 2019).

When you get the task to design something , you will instinctively start gathering information about the requirements that have to be fulfilled. Everything IT is doing should support the business in some way.

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622).… Read more

VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 – Data Center Virtualization Design Exam (VCAP-DCV Design 2021)

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In August 2018 I’ve passed the VCAP6-DCV Deployment exam. After a busy first half of 2019 it’s time to start preparing the VMware Certified Advanced Professional — Data Center Virtualization Design 2019 exam. But I lost focus and in 2020 I had a lot to do – but not VMW related and so I also missed my goal to take the VCAP-DCV Design exam.

I have to push myself, so I decided to re-cap my half finished blog series to get myself back on track.

There are many great study guides out there, but in most cases I need “my own study guide” to feel well prepared. I hope this blog series will keep me on track, and I stay focused.… Read more

Two registry changes to improve physical Horizon View Agent experience

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Using physical clients as Horizon View agents is pretty common for me. My office pc, as well as my Lenovo X250 are often used by using the Horizon View Client and the Blast protocol. But as good as the performance is, there were a couple of things that bugged me.

Bild von Mediamodifier auf Pixabay 

On my office pc, I encountered pretty often a black screen, either on first connect, or on reconnect. The typical issue caused by misconfigured firewall policies, but this was completly out of scope in this case, because my collegues never had issues with black screens. The problem occured with different versions of View Agent.… Read more

MFA disabled, but Azure asks for second factor?!

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I just had a Teams call with a customer to resolve a strange mystery about Azure MFA.

The customer called me and explained, that he has a user with Azure Multifactor Authentication (MFA) disabled, but when he logs in with this account, he is asked to setup MFA. He setup MFA and was able to login according to their Conditional Access policies.

Bild von Lalmch auf Pixabay 

The customer and I took a look into their tenant and checked a couple of things. The first thing the customer showed me was this screen:

As you can see, the MFA state for this user is “disabled” (german language screenshot). Then we tool a look using the MSOnline PowerShell module.… Read more

vCenter Server migration to 6.7 fails with “Failed to check VMware STS. The SSL certificate of STS service cannot be verified”

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There are still customers out there that are running vCenter Server on a Windows host. This year, despite the fact that most customers have set project on hold, I managed some of them to migrate to a vCenter Server Appliance.

Some days ago I had an meeting with one of my favorite customers to migrate their vCenter Server 6.5 to a vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 U3l. They were still on 6.5 because of some legacy ESXi 5.5 hosts, but they managed it to remove them from their vCenter and we were able to start the migration.

Healthcheck & Stage 1

We did a healthcheck the day before, so we pretty sure that everything should will went smooth.… Read more

Details on Windows 10 E3/ E5 Subscription Activation

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One of my customers purchased a bunch of Microsoft 365 subscriptions in order to use them with Office 365 and Windows 10 Enterprise. The customer called me because he had trouble to activate the Windows 10 Enterprise license.

Source: Microsoft

I would like so summarize some of the requirements in order to successfuly active Windows 10 Enterprise subscriptions.

License

First of all, there is a licensing requirement. You need at least a Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10 Pro Education. You need one of these licenses! There is no way to use the Windows 10 Enterprise subscription without a base license, because it’s an upgrade!… Read more

Horizon View – Why Automated Desktop Pools with Full Clones are still a thing

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We have to deal with COVID19 for a year now and from the IT perspective, 2020 was a pretty strange year. Many project were not cancelled, but were placed on-hold. But two kinds of projects went through the roof:

  • Microsoft 365, and
  • Horizon View

As you might noticed I blogged a lot about Exchange, Exchange Online and Horizon this year. The reason for this is pretty simple: That was driving my business this year.

In early 2020, when we decided to move into our home offices, we deployed Horizon View on physical PCs at ML Network (my employer). This was a simple solution and it works for us until today.

Some of my customers also deployed Horizon View for the same reason: A secure and easy way to get a desktop.… Read more

Adobe Flash will die and how does this affects VMware

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December 31, 2020 will not only be the end of the miserable year 2020, it will also be the end of an era – the era of Adobe Flash! Adobe has announced that they will stop supporting Adobe Flash after December 31, 2020. Furthermore, Adobe will block Flash from running in Flash Player on January 12, 2021. Adobe strongly recommends that all users immediately uninstall Flash Player. I got a popup a couple of times, asking me if I want to uninstall Adobe Flash. It’s still installed… :/

Adobe Flash isn’t a big thing in web development anymore, but there is a reason why I still have Adobe Flash installed – Admin Interfaces!… Read more

Exchange HCW8078 – Migration Endpoint could not be created

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While migrating a customer from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2016, I had to create an Exchange Hybrid Deployment, because the customer wants to use Microsoft Teams. Nothing fancy and I’ve did this a couple of times.

Unfortunantely the Hybrid Connection Wizard failed to create the migration endpoint. A quick check of the logs showed this error:

Microsoft.Exchange.MailboxReplicationService.MRSRemotePermanentException: The Mailbox Replication Service could not connect to the remote server because the certificate is invalid. The call to 'https://mail.contoso.com/EWS/mrsproxy.svc' failed.
… Read more