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

NetScaler Gateway – Cannot complete your request

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A customer reported a weird problem with his NetScaler Gateway. Upon the first load of the website, they got an error “Cannot complete your request”. After clicking OK the error disappeared and does not occured again after reloading the website. Only after closing and re-opening the browser. I got this message in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not from a remote machine, e.g. my PC at the office.

I found no configuration error or something, that would have explained this message. Finally, I found something that caught my attention:

I found this using the Firefox Web Development Tools (I only had a Firefox and IE on my remote machine).… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 1.2 Gather and analyze application requirements

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This blog post covers objective 1.2 (Gather and analyze application requirements) 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:

  • Gather and analyze application requirements for a given scenario
  • Determine the requirements for a set of applications that will be included in the design
  • Collect information needed in order to identify application dependencies
  • Given one or more application requirements, determine the impact of the requirements on the design

Gather and analyze application requirements for a given scenario

As a result of our already done work, we should know with what applications we have to deal in our project.… Read more

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – 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 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).

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). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

  • Associate a stakeholder with the information that needs to be collected
  • Utilize inventory and assessment data from a current environment to define a baseline state
  • Analyze customer interview data to explicitly define customer objectives for a conceptual design
  • Determine customer priorities for defined objectives
  • Ensure that Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability and Security (AMPRS) considerations are applied during the requirements gathering process
  • Given results of the requirements gathering process, identify requirements for a conceptual design
  • Categorize requirements by infrastructure qualities to prepare for logical design requirements

Associate a stakeholder with the information that needs to be collected

Let’s start with the stakeholders and why they are important for us.… Read more

VMware Certified Advanced Professional — Data Center Virtualization Design 2019 Study Guide

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Last year in September 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.

There are many great study guides out there, but in most cases I need “my own study guide” to feel well prepared. I hope the step to publish my notes helps me to stay focused and motivated.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

In opposite to the Deploy exam, the Design exam is a MC exam. 135 Minutes for 60 questions. Sounds easy, but it’s told that it’s one of the hardest exams available by VMware.… Read more

Out of space – first steps when a datastore runs out of space

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This is a situation that never should happen, and I had to deal with it only a couple of times in more than 10y working with VMware vSphere/ ESXi. In most cases, the reason for this was the usage of thin-provisioned disks together with small datastores. Yes, that’s a bad design. Yes, this should never happen.

There is a nearly 100% chance that this setup will fail one day. Either because someone dumps much data into the VMs, or because of VM snapshots. But such a setip WILL FAIL one day.

Yesterday was one of these days and five VMs have stopped working on a small ESXi in a site of one of my customers. A quick look into the vCenter confirmed my first assumption.… Read more

User vdcs does not have the expected uid 1006

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Sorry for the long delay since my last blog post – busy times, but with lots of vSphere. :) Today, I did an upgrade of a standalone vCenter Server Appliance at one of my healthcare customers. The vCenter was on 6.0 U3 and I had to upgrade it to 6.7 U2. It was only a small deployment with three hosts, so nothing fancy. And as with in many other vSphere upgrades, I came across this warning message:

Warning User vdcs does not have the expected uid 1006
Resolution Please refer to the corresponding KB article.

I saw this message multiple times, but in the past, there was no KB article about this, only a VMTN thread.… Read more