This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
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.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
What’s new?
Beside of bug fixes, BDR Suite v4.0.1 also includes some new enhancements. In my opinion, the most significant enhancements are:
Significant performance improvement in Quick VM Recovery on VMware environments
Rescan option is introduced in Hyper-V Manager Servers page, which allows you to install Vembu Integration Service on the newly added node of the Hyper-V cluster (or if it’s not available on the existing node)
Backups configured through BDR Server console will run in parallel (Default parallel backup count is set to 5 and it is configurable)
Ability to add new Hyper-V hosts or choose existing hosts while performing Live Recovery to Hyper-V host
Interested in trying Vembu BDR suite? Try the 30-day free trial now! For any questions, simply send an e-mail to vembu-support@vembu.com or follow them on Twitter.
If you are a small or mid-sized businesses, check out the Vembu BDR Essentials package!
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Using a password safe, or password management system, is not a best practice – it’s a common practice. I’m using KeePass for years, because it’s available for different platforms, it can be used offline, it is Open Source, and it is not bound to any cloud services. Keepass allows me securely store usernames, passwords, recovery codes etc. for different services and websites, and together with features like autotype, Keepass offers a plus security and convenience.
I use 2FA or MFA wherever I can. That’s the reason why I’m a big fan of SSH public key authentication. But SSH key handling is sometimes inconvenient. You simple don’t want to store your SSH private keys on a cloud drive, and you don’t want to store them on a USB stick, or distribute them over different devices. In the past, I stored my SSH private keys on a cloud-drive in an encrypted container. When I needed a key, I decrypted the container and was able to use them. But this solution was inconvenient.
So what to do?
AbsolutVision/ pixabay.com/ Pixybay License
While searching for a solution I stumbled over KeeAgent, which is a plugin for KeePass. Keeagent allows you to store SSH keys in a KeePass database. KeeAgent then acts as SSH agent. I’m using this with PuTTY and MobaXterm and it works like a charm.
Setup KeeAgent
All you need is KeePass 2.x and the KeeAgent plugin. After installing the plugin (simply put the plgx file into C:\Program Files (x86)\KeePass Password Safe 2\Plugins), you can create a new entry in your KeePass database.
The password is the SSH private key passphrase. Then add the public and private key file to the newly created keepass database entry.
The KeeAgent.settings entry will be added automatically. Jump to the “KeeAgent” tab.
If required, keys can be loaded automatically if the database is locked, or you can add them later using the menu “Extras > KeeAgent”. Not every database entry can be used with KeeAgent, you have to enable the first checkbox to allow KeeAgent to use a specific database entry.
I create a database entry for each key pair I want to use with KeeAgent. And I only add frequently used keys automatically to KeeAgent. I have tons of keys and 99% of them are only added if I need them.
With KeeAgent in place, I can start new SSH sessions and KeeAgent delivers the matching key. You can see this in this screenshot “…from agent”.
I really don’t want to miss KeePass and KeeAgent. It makes my life easier and more secure.
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
I got this error in a new deployment of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4. The error occured every day at 9 pm.
24.02.2019 21:00:11 :: Error: Remote deployment and management is available for licensed agents only. Please change your backup server settings to allow managed agents to consume the license, then perform a protection group rescan.
The solution to this issue is pretty simple. Make sure that you allow the consumption of licenses for free agents. You will find this option under General > License.
Another workaround is to disable the protection group. Right click “Manually Added” under “Physical & Cloud Infrastructure” and click “Disable”.
Let me know if one of these workarounds worked for you. :)
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
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.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
The Vembu BDR Suite
The Vembu BDR Suite is an one stop solution to all your backup and disaster recovery needs. That is what Vembu says about their own product. The BDR Suite covers
Backup and replication of VMs running on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
Backup and bare-metal recovery for physical servers and workstations (Windows Server and Desktop)
File and application backups of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Outlook, and MySQL
Creating of backup copies and transfer of them to a DR site
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 has got some pretty nice new features. IMHO, there are four highlights:
Hyper-V Failover Cluster Support for Backup & Recovery
Shared VHDX Backup
Hyper-V Checksum Based Incremental, and the
Credential Manager
There is a significat chance that you use a Hyper-V Failover Cluster if you have more than one Hyper-V host. With v4.0 Vembu added support for backup and recovery for the VMs residing in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster. Even if the VMs running on Hyper-V cluster move from one host to another, the backups will continue to run without any interruption.
A feature, that I’m really missing in VMware and Veeam, is the support for the backup shared VHDX files. v4.0 added support for this.
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 also added support bot performing incremental backups with Hyper-V. They call it Checksum based incremental method, but it is in fact Change Block Tracking. An important feature for Hyper-V customers!
The Vembu Credential Manager allows you to store the necessary credentials at one place, use it everywhere inside the Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.
But there are also other, very nice enhancements.
Handling new disk addition for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V, which allows the backup of newly added disks at the next backup. In prioir releases, newly added disks were only backuped during the next full backup.
Reconnection for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V jobs in case of a dropped network connection
Application-wware processing for Hyper-V VMs can now enabled on a per-VM basis
API for VM list with Storage utilization report which allows you to generate detailed reports whenever you need one
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
On January 18, 2018, Microsoft has published KB4074871 which has the title “Exchange Server guidance to protect against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities”. As you might guess, Exchange is affected by Meltdown & Spectre – like any other software. Microsoft explains in KB4074871:
Because these are hardware-level attacks that target x64-based and x86-based processor systems, all supported versions of Microsoft Exchange Server are affected by this issue.
Like Citrix, Microsoft does not offer any updates to address this issue, because there is nothing to fix in Microsoft Exchange. Instead of this, Microsoft recommends to run the lates Exchange Server cumulative update and any required security updates. On top, Microsoft recommends to check software before it is deployed into production. If Exchange is running in a VM, Microsoft recommends to follow the instructions offered by the cloud or hypervisor vendor.
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Each of us has his or her personal tool chain. Depending on your job role, the tool chain will look different. My personal tool chain does not have changed much over the last few years, but if I added or removed a tool to my tool chain, this change was often influenced by other peoples tool chain.
My primary work device is a Lenovo ThinkPad X250 (Intel i5 5200U, 8 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD) with Windows 10. I’ve added a 6 cell battery, so I have ~ 95 Wh of battery capacity. This gives me ~ 16h of battery lifetime with my common workload. The 12,5″ screen seems to be small, but it’s okay as I have two 24″ displays at the office. It’s small, lightweight, long battery life and powerful. I awaited the new Lenovo Thinkpads, that were presented some day ago on the CES. But Lenovo removed the Ethernet port on the X280. So this is not longer an option. Maybe the T480 with an additional 72 Wh battery… Devices and accessories are safely stowed in an Eastpack Floid Ash Blend2. It’s a great backpack, light and not too big.
Browser and Office
I have used Google Chrome for years, but with the latest Firefox release I switched back to Firefox and disabled all Google services I used before. I even try to avoid using google.com and use duckduckgo.com instead. Microsoft Office 2013 is corporate standard, so nothing much to say about it.
Knowledge Management
I primarily use two tools to dump my brain onto my hard disk. One is Microsoft OneNote, the other one is XMind 8 Pro. I’m using OneNote to store snippets, meeting protocols, summaries etc. in two notebooks. One notebook is for customer related stuff, the other notebook is for knowhow and snippets. A third notebook is shared between colleagues and me. I often use the web version of OneNote, available on onenote.com.
Tools
Royal TS is an awesome remote management solution, helping me to keep track of all those RDP and VNC sessions. And it can do much more. I switches from PuTTY to KiTTY last year. KiTTY is a PuTTY fork with some nice additions, like folders or scripting. My VMware application stack consists of the good, old VMware vSphere C# Client (don’t judge me…), PowerCLI and the VMware vSphere Remote Console. The web-based Clients are onboard as well. Filezilla is something that I’m using for years. FTP, S/FTP oder SCP are common protocols, most times used to upload firmware, or download config files from network devices. Wireshark is another veteran in my tool chain. Nothing much to say. The army knife in case of network troubleshooting. Authy is pretty new in my tool chain. I discovered it some weeks ago as an alternative to the Google Authenticator app in my iPhone. A pretty cool app. I can have the same accounts on my smartphone and in a desktop app. No need to grab my phone if I need 2FA at my laptop. And, IMHO a big benefit, an encrypted backup of my 2FA accounts. But 2FA or MFA is only one factor. The other factor is the password and I’m forcing me to use different passwords for different services. I’m getting older, so I use Keepass to store my usernames and passwords in a safe, password protected and encrypted database.
Development
I’m not a developer. But sometimes I have to write scripts in PowerShell or Python, transform data etc. My developer tool chain is full of well known tools. Notepad++ is my favorite text editor for years. ISE Steroids is still my favorite PowerShell IDE, even if I have Visual Studio Code installed. But this is mainly used for Python. ISE Steroids variable monitoring function is superior. Currently, I don’t get my mind wrapped around the VS Code debugging mode. But I swear that I will try it in 2018! GitHub Desktop is mandatory, not only for PowerShell and Python snippets, but also for my scripts and dot files (VIM, ZSH etc.).
Other stuff
Sometimes I like to hear music during work. I love Spotify. I don’t have to run VMs on my laptop, but when I have to, VMware Workstation Pro is my desktop virtualizer of choice. For reading PDFs I switched from Adobe Reader to Google Chrome, and after removing Chrome, to Foxit Reader.
This posting is ~7 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
3 days ago, on 13th October 2016, HPE has released patch bundle 9,08 for Data Protector 9. A patch bundle isn’t a directly installable version, instead it’s a bundle of patches and enhancements for a specific version of Data Protector, in this case Data Protector 9.
Beside fixes for discovered problems, a patch bundle includes also enhancements. There are some enhancements in this patch bundle, that have caught my attention particularly.
QCCR2A64053: Support for object copy of file system data to Microsoft Azure. Data Protector now supports the creation of a special backup device, which can be used together with Data Protector object copies, to copy Data Protector file system backups to Azure Backup Vaults. This is an easy way to create copies of important data on Microsoft Azure.
Contemporaneous with the announcement of Data Protector 9.08, I got an e-mail of HPE with the information, that one of my change request has made it into the latest patch bundle:
QCCR2A68100: VMWARE GRE stays in debug mode. I have observed this behaviour in different Data Protector installations: If debugging isn’t explicitly disabled (OB2DBG=0 in the omnirc), the VMware GRE always writes debug logs. Regardless if debugging is enabled or disabled in the GRE configuration.
Because of some security related changes and fixes in Data Protector 9.08, HPE has marked this patch bundle as critical.
This posting is ~7 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Shrinking a big database on a Microsoft SQL Server can take some time. And it’s one of those tasks, where you wont get a status until it’s finished. I really hate this… But this small T-SQL query can help:
SELECT
percent_complete,
dateadd(second,estimated_completion_time/ 1000, getdate()) as est_completion_time
FROM
sys.dm_exec_requests
WHERE
command = 'DbccFilesCompact'
Simply open a new query windows, paste the query into the query windows and execute the query. The query outputs the progress in percent and the estimated completion time.
This posting is ~8 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
I’m not a developer. I deal mainly with infrastructe, things like virtualization, storage & backup, networking etc. Sometimes I had to write scripts, primarily PowerShell, batch or Bash. Many years back, I also wrote Csh and Ksh scripts. In the past years, automation was one of the rising trends in the infrastructure segment. And with automation, new challenges came up. Today I have to work with Windows PowerShell, in case of VMware with PowerCLI (which bases on Windows PowerShell), and sometimes I have use with REST APIs. I’m still not a developer. Due to this fact, I need tools that help me getting my work done.
So I was searching for a tool, mainly for PowerShell development, and I’ve tried some tools. Microsoft Visual Studio was to complex. Microsoft Visual Studio Code was light, but offered not the features I needed. The Windows integrated PowerShell ISE was nice, but it also lacked some features. So I asked on Twitter:
Recommendations for a light #PowerShell IDE? Have tried Visual Studio Code with PowerShell extension. Not my favorite… -.-
ISESteroids is not a standalone product. It’s a PowerShell module that extents the built-in PowerShell ISE. That’s nice, because you don’t have to install anything. Simply extract it. You don’t need any special privileges to install it. Load the PowerShell module, done.
ISESteroids offers a broad feature set and transforms the PowerShell ISE into a full-featured PowerShell IDE. Visit the ISESteroids homepage for a full feature list. Nothing I want to copy & paste here.
Why is ISESteroids helpful for me?
As already mentioned: I’m not a developer. Therefore, I’m thankful for all hints and tips to make my scripts better. One of the features that I noticed immediately was the light bulb on the left side of the scripting area. The icon indicates that there is an automatic fix. In my case, this is usually converting double into single quotes.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Another often mentioned fix is the replacement of aliases with the full command names. Another feature I really like is the risk analyzer. Sometimes you use commands and functions, that might not work with future releases, or which involve other risks. The risk analyzer is an easy way to highlight these risky commands and functions.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Green indicates: Everything’s fine. If something risky is found, you will get a explanation why this was marked as a risky element. If you still want to use it, you can add the marked element to a whitelist. Some risks, are not a risk at all. The risk analyzer will mark the usage of the cmdlet Move-VM as a risk. This is because cmdlets with the verb “Move” will move things. IN case of Move-VM, this is intended. That’s something you can certainly whitelists.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
One of my most used cmdlets is Get-Help. Intellisense is nice, but sometimes I have to look up the correct syntax or similar. ISESteroids offers a context sensitive help. Click on the icon with the question mark,
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
and you will see a new add-on tab on the left. Very handy. Click on a command, and the help will appear help add-on tab.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
You might notice another add-on tab in the picture above: Variables. This tab belongs to the Variables monitor, which can be useful to watch the content of variables. I use it frequently in conjunction with the debugging function.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
You can set breakpoints, add variables to the monitor and then watch the content of the variable.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
But you can also take a look at the current content of variables, in this case $VMhostScsiLunPaths.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
The last feature I’d like to show, is the AutoRefactor. Usually, I tend to follow best practices (mostly my own…) to make my scripts more “readable”. The AutoRefactor feature of ISESteroids helps me to make my scripts cleaner and more readable. It’s customizable, so I can tweak it where necessary. You can enable the refactor add-on tab by clicking the small icon with the check mark.
Patrick Terlisten/ www.vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Write down the code and click “Fix Script Now”. Then watch the magic. ;)
Why didn’t I highlight the other cool features, like code signing, file version control, keyboard shortcuts or test arguments? Because I’m still not a developer. The features I mentioned in this blog post are worthy enough to buy a PowerShell ISE license. Check the full feature list, download and install the trial version. I really recommend to take a look at the trial version! I was sceptical until I worked with ISESteroids. It was a great recommendation!
Licensing
ISESteroids is available in two commercial licenses:
Professional
Enterprise
The Professional license is available for 99 €, the Enterprise license costs 249 €. Latter offers more features. For individuals (natural persons), a discounted Enterprise license (99 €) is available. Startups, MVPs, trainers etc. can request a discounted license. Check the order website for more details.
This posting is ~8 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Sometimes you need to reset the ILO Administrator password. Sure, you can reboot the server, press F8 and then reset the Administrator password. If you have installed a HP customized ESXi image, then there is a much better way to reset the password: HPONCFG.
Check the /opt/hp/tools directory. You will find a binary called hponcfg.
~ # ls -l /opt/hp/tools/
total 5432
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 5129574 Oct 28 2014 conrep
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 108802 Oct 28 2014 conrep.xml
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 59849 Jan 16 2015 hpbootcfg
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 251 Jan 16 2015 hpbootcfg_esxcli
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 232418 Jul 14 2014 hponcfg
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 12529 Oct 31 2013 hptestevent
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 250 Oct 31 2013 hptestevent_esxcli
All you need is a simple XML file. You can use the VI editor or you can copy the necessary file with WinSCP to the root home directory on your ESXi host. I prefer VI. Change the directory to /opt/hp/tools. Then open the pwreset.xml.
~ # vi pwreset.xml
Press i to switch to the insert mode. Then paste this content into the file. You don’t have to know the current password!
