Veeam Backup & Replication: Backup of Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controller VMs

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To backup a virtual machine, Veeam Backup & Replication needs two permissions:

  • permission to access and backup the VM, as well as the
  • permission to do specific tasks inside the VM

to guarantee a consistent backup. The former persmission is granted by the user account that is used to access the VMware vCenter server (sorry for the VMW focust at this point). Usually, this account has the Administrator role granted at the vCenter Server level. The latter permission is granted by a user account that has permissions inside the guest operating system.

Something I often see in customer environments is the usage of the Domain Administrator account.… Read more

Veeam and StoreOnce: Wrong FC-HBA driver/ firmware causes Windows BSoD

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One of my customers bought a very nice new backup solution, which consists of a

  • HPE StoreOnce 5100 with ~ 144 TB usable capacity,
  • and a new HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with Windows Server 2016

as new backup server. StoreOnce and backup server will be connected with 8 Gb Fibre-Channel and 10 GbE to the existing network and SAN. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 U3a is already in use, as well as VMware vSphere 6.5 Enterprise Plus. The backend storage is a HPE 3PAR 8200.

This setup allows the usage of Catalyst over Fibre-Channel together with Veeam Storage Snapshots, and this was intended to use.

I wrote about a similar setup some month ago: Backup from a secondary HPE 3PAR StoreServ array with Veeam Backup & Replication.… Read more

Out-of-Office replies are dropped due to empty MAIL FROM

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Today I had an interesting support call. A customer noticed that Out-of-Office replies were not received by recipients, even though the OoO option were enabled for internal and external recipients. Internal recipients got the OoO reply, but none of the external recipients.

The Message Tracking Log is a good point to start. I quickly discovered that the Exchange server was unable to send the OoO mails. You can use the eventid FAIL to get a list of all failed messages.

Very interesting was the RecipientStatus of a failed mail.

550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable  is a pretty interesting error when sending mails over a mail relay of your ISP.… Read more

Database Availability Group (DAG) witness is in a failed state

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As part of a maintenance job I had to update a 2-node Exchange Database Availability Group and a file-share witness server.

After the installation of Windows updates on the witness server and the obligatory reboot, the witness left in a failed state.

Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 is now generally available

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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.

Last week, Vembu has announced the availability of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0! Vembu’s new release is all about maintaining business continuity and ensuring high availability. Apart from new features, this release features significant enhancements and bug fixes that are geared towards performance improvement.

The Vembu BDR Suite

The Vembu BDR Suite is an one stop solution to all your backup and disaster recovery needs.… Read more

Exam prep & experience: Citrix NetScaler Advanced Topics: Security, Management, and Optimization (1Y0-340)

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In May 2018, Citrix released their new Citrix Certified Expert – Networking certification, which completet the networking certification path at the upper end (blog post on training.citrix.com). The track starts with the Associate (CCA-N), the lower-level certification is a requirement for achieving the higher-level certification, continues with the Professional (CCP-N), and ends with the Expert (CCE-N) certification. This is pretty cool, and I’m very happy that Citrix now offers the CCE-N, because the expert-level certification was missing all the time.

Everything is cool… except you have passed exam 1Y0-351 to gain your CCP-N.… Read more

Vembu VMBackup Deployment Scenarios

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Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite.

One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way. The offered features are compareable to Veeam Backup & Replication.

The core component of Vembu VMBackup is the Vembu BDR Backup server, which can be deployed in two ways:

  • On-premises Deployment
  • Hybrid Deployment

On-premises Deployment

In this deployment setup, customers deploy the product in their local environment.… Read more

“Cannot execute upgrade script on host” during ESXi 6.5 upgrade

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I was onsite at one of my customers to update a small VMware vSphere 6.0 U3 environment to 6.5 U2c. The environment consists of three hosts. Two hosts in a cluster, and a third host is only used to run a HPE StoreVirtual Failover Manager.

The update of the first host, using the Update Manager and a HPE custom ESX 6.5 image, was pretty flawless. But the update of the second host failed with “Cannot execute upgrade script on host”

I checked the host and found it with ESXi 6.5 installed. But I was missing one of the five iSCSI datastores. Then I tried to patch the host with the latest patches and hit “Remidiate”.… Read more

High CPU usage on Citrix ADC VPX

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While building a small Citrix NetScaler… ehm… ADC VPX (I really hate this name…) lab environment, I noticed that the fan of my Lenovo T480s was spinning up. I was wondering why, because the VPX VM was just running for a couple of minutes – without any load. But the task manager told me, that the VMware Workstation Process was consuming 25% (I have a Intel i5 Quad Core CPU) CPU. So VMware Workstation was just eating a whole CPU core without doing anything. I would not care, but the fan… And it reminded me, that I’ve seen an similar behaviour in various VPX deployments on VMWare ESXi.… Read more

Using Let’s Encrypt DNS-01 challenge validation with local BIND instance

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I’m using Let’s Encrypt certificates for a while now. In the past, I used the standalone plugin (TLS-SNI-01) to get or renew my certificates. But now I switched to the DNS plugin. I run my own name servers with BIND, so it was a very low hanging fruit to get this plugin to work.

To get or renew a certificate, you need to provide some kind of proof that you are requesting the certificate for a domain that is under your control. No certificate authority (CA) wants to be the CA, that hands you out a certificate for google.com or amazon.com…

The DNS-01 challenge uses TXT records in order to validate your ownership over a certain domain.… Read more