Connecting to Exchange Online with PowerShell

The task was simple: Change the alias and the primary SMTP address of a Microsoft Teams team. This can be done by changing the alias and the SMTP address of the underlaying Office 365 group. But how? All you need is a PowerShell connection to Exchange Online. Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0 All you need is a PowerShell on your local computer and Office 365 credentials with the necessary privileges.

Space reclamation of VMFS 5 Datastores using esxcli

It was a bit quiet here in January caused by a new “private project” which has attracted some resources, and will pull more resources in the future. But this will not stop me from documenting useful stuff. This one is nothing new, but commonly asked by some customers: How do I get my storage capacity back after deleting VMs?! The outlined steps are all done using esxcli. You need to execute them on a single ESXi host, not on each host in the cluster.

VCAP6.5-DCV Design - Objective 2.4 Build manageability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design

This seems to be my last blog post for 2019 and it covers covers objective 2.4 (Build manageability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design) 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 necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622).

VCAP6.5-DCV Design - Objective 2.3 Build availability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design

This blog post covers objective 2.3 (Build availability requirements into a vSphere 6.x logical design) 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 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:

Why we need a vSAN licensing for SMB customers

Not every customer is running a full-blown vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing. To be honest, when I look at the number of sold licenses, most of my customers are running vSphere Essentials Plus. Not Essentials, nor Standard or Enterprise (Plus), but two or three hosts with Essentials Plus. And that’s perfectly fine! Two or three hosts with 10 GbE and pretty often 12G SAS. Some of them with Fibre-Channel, nearly no one with iSCSI.

VMware ESXi 6.7: Recurring host hardware sensor state alarm

If you found this blog post because you are searchting for a solution for a FAN FAILURE on your ProLiant Gen10 HW after applying the latest ESXi 6.7 patches, then use this shortcut for the workaround: Fan health sensors report false alarms on HPE Gen10 Servers with ESXi 6.7 I had a really annoying problem at one of my customers. After deploying new VMware ESXi hosts (HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10) along with an upgrade of the vCenter Server Appliance to 6.

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.2 Map service dependencies

This blog post covers objective 2.2 (Map service dependencies) 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 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: Evaluate dependencies for infrastructure and application services that will be included in a vSphere design Create Entity Relationship Diagrams that map service relationships and dependencies Analyze interfaces to be used with new and existing business processes Determine service dependencies for logical components Include service dependencies in a vSphere 6.

Load balancing ADFS and ADFS Proxy using Citrix ADC

Last week I had to setup a small Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) farm that will be used to allow Single Sign-On (SSO) with Office 365. Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is a solution developed by Microsoft to provide users an authenticated access to applications, that are not capable of using Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA). Required by the customer was a two node ADFS farm located on the internal network, and a two node ADFS Proxy farm located at the DMZ.

vCenter Migration from 6.0 to 6.7 fails due to missing user role

Actually, yesterday should be the day at which I migrate one of the last physical Windows vCenter servers installed in my customer base. Actually… the migration failed twice. And each time I had to rollback, power-on the old physical server, reset the computer account etc. The update was from VMware vCenter Server 6.0 Update 3d (7462484) on a Windows 2012 R2 server to vCenter Server 6.7 Update 3 (Appliance). The migration failed at 62% with the following message:

VCAP6.5-DCV Design – Objective 2.1 Map business requirements to a vSphere 6.x logical design

The last few weeks have been quite busy. Time to focus on exam preparation again. Let’s start with the first objective of the second section. This blog post covers objective 2.1 (Map business requirements to a vSphere 6.x logical design) 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 necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622).