A couple of days ago, I wrote about our first steps to move our on-prem stuff to Azure. This post will cover how we adopted Office 365 and how we have started with our Azure deployment.

Our first step into Office 365 was Microsoft Teams. We needed a solution for calls (audio/ video) and chat. We skipped Skype 4 Business and started with Microsoft Teams.

Our Microsoft Teams deployment was pretty simple: We used our Microsoft IUR Office 365 E3 plans. Microsoft Azure AD Connect was quickly deployed and the Microsoft Exchange Hybrid Connection Wizard did the rest. Some weeks later we deployed ADFS/ ADFS Proxy. We used this setup over several months and it was pretty slick and was working flawless. At this point, we only used Teams, Planner and OneDrive 4 Business (SharePoint).

As part of an ongoing Exchange 2010 to 2016 migration, I had to replace the self-signed certificate with a certificate from the customers PKI. Everything went fine, the customer had a suitable template, we’ve added the necessary hostnames and bound IIS and SMTP to the certificate. The mess started with an iisreset /noforce…

The iisreset took longer than expected. After that, I tried to login into the ECP, entered username and password and got an error.

It was a bit quiet here due to the current COVID 19 pandemic. But now I’m back with a pretty interesting story on how my colleagues and I moved most of our on-prem server stuff to Microsoft Azure and Office 365.

It all started with the COVID19 lockdown in Germany in March 2020. We moved into our home offices after setting up a small VMware Horizon View deployment to access our PCs using physical View Agents and manual desktop pools. Most projects were stopped, and we did most of our work remote. No lay-offs or short-time work.

The View Agent Direct-Connection (VADC) Plug-In was designed as an extension to the Horizon Agent, which allows a Horizon Client to directly connect to a VM or physical machine withtout using a Horizon Connection Server.

The VADC is nothing new, it is part of the Horizon View eco system for a couple of years now. Meanwhile, the VADC supports the Blast Exteme protocol, which makes it pretty interesting for remote access to lab environment or home office equipment.

This issue was a bit annoying. I faced this issue not in a customer environment, rather then on my second Lenovo laptop, an X250 with Windows 10 20H2. My intention was to use it headless in a docking station. So how should I access it? RDP? TeamViewer? Why not use the Horizon Direct Connection Plug-in?

The Horizon Direct Connection Plug-in is not a new feature and you can think of it as a View Agent without a Connection Server. You can access it using the View Client, but you don’t have to run the connection through a Connection Server. For pretty small environments or direct access a perfect fit!

After a reboot, a VMware ESXi 6.7 U3 told me that he has no compatible NICs. Fun fact: Right before the reboot everything was fine.

The ILO also showed no NICs. Unfortunately, I wasn’t onsite to pull the blade server and put it back in. But there is a way to do this “virtually”.

You have to connect to the IP address of the Onboard Administrator via SSH. Then issue the reset server command with the bay of the server you want to reset and an argument.

During an vSphere 6.5 > 6.7 update a was host failing continously at the remediation with an “unknown error”. The host was updated from ESXI 6.5 to 6.7 using an upgrade baseline. Other hosts were updated to 6.7 and with the latest patches without any issues. Something strange was going on…

The esxupdate.log and the vua.log on the host itself showed nothing special. So I checked the vmware-vum-server-log4cpp.log which was much more informative!

Public Folders are still a thing. And while companies are moving their stuff into the cloud, Public Folders still need to be accessed by cloud-located mailboxes.

Allowing the access from Exchange Online mailboxes to on-premise hosted Public Folders is well documented by Microsoft, but there are also some fuzz. I had to deal with this during a Office 365 transition project at one of my customers.

The background

The customer is running a single Exchange 2016 server in a Windows Server 2012 R2 forest. AzureAD Sync is running and its syncing on-premise identities to AzureAD. The customer uses Office 365 E5 plans and he wants to move to Exchange Online, aside other O365 services like SharePoint Online, Teams etc.

A customer of mine asked for help to analyse a weird OAuth error. They are using a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Outlook plugin, which came up with an error:

"Can't connect to Exchange"

In addition to this, they also faced an issueaccessing shared calendars of Exchange Online mailboxes.

Clearly an OAuth error. So we ran the Hybrid Connection Wizard again, which finished without any errors. But the errors persisted. Next stop: OAuth configuration.

Six weeks ago, I passed the Microsoft AZ-103 exam and earned the Azure Administrator Associate. A last minute pass, because AZ-104 was already launched. But better late than never. I had to re-schedule the exam a couple of times because the test center was closed due to COVID19.

The Azure Administrator Associate is a Administrator-role certification and it is all about implementing, managing and monitoring the Azure identity, governance, storage, compute, and virtual network solutions.