Its been four month since my last blog post, and the blog frequency was quite low before that. This blog is, to be honest, a giant pile of stuff that has not worked as expected. Okay, some random thoughts or howto’s, but most blog posts are about stuff that failed in some way. That’s a bit “depressing”. I should write more about the fun things in my life For a pretty long time my focus was on infrastructure.

Adding a second factor to your authentication is always a good idea. Typically the second factor is a One-Time Password (OTP) or a push notification. But what if you want to allow the login into your Horizon View environment only from specific devices? This implies that you need some kind of second factore that also identifies the device. At this point the arch enemy of many of us comes into play: Certificates!

Today I had to deploy a new vCenter appliance. Nothing fancy, new deployment. Stage 1 was easy, but stage 2 failed several times. I re-deployed the vCenter appliance two times, but as the deployment failed for the third time, I took a look into the logs. The deployment failed without any error, but it didn’t finished. It stopped during the start of different services without any error. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0

One of my customers replaced the old Veeam environment with new gear. The HW was pretty simple designed: two HPE ProLiant per server two HPE D3610 enclosures with 6 TB disks ~ 5km between backup server and backup copy destination One server was designed to act as the Veeam backup server and repository, and the second server was designed to act as the backup copy destination. Both servers were running Windows Server 2019 Standard.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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. The customer and I took a look into their tenant and checked a couple of things.

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.