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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

You might got this news some days ago: Starting with September 1, 2020, browsers and devices from Apple, Google, and Mozilla will show errors for new TLS certificates that have a lifespan greater than 398 days. Due to this move from Apple, Google and Mozilla, you have to deal with the replacement of certificates much more often. And we all know: Replacing certificates can be a real PITA! Replacing TLS certificates used for ADFS and Office 365 can be a challenging task, and this blog post will cover the neccessary steps.

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. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0 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.

I’ve got several mails and comments about this topic. It looks like that the latest ESXi 6.7 updates are causing some trouble on HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers. I’ve blogged about recurring host hardware sensor state alarm messages some weeks ago. A customer noticed them after an update. Last week, I got the first comments under this blog post abot fan failure messages after applying the latest ESXi 6.7 updates. Then more and more customers asked me about this, because they got these messages too in their environment after applying the latest updates.

Microsoft Teams got a big push due to the current COVID19 crisis and many of my customers deployed it in the past weeks. At ML Network, we are using Microsoft Teams for more than a year, and we don’t want to miss it anymore. We are running Exchange 2016 on-premises, currently CU16. We were missing the calendar tab in Teams since we started with Microsoft Teams. when you do some research about this issue, you will find many threads and blog posts, but these are the two key facts: