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 6.7 U2, the customer reported recurring host hardware sensor state alarm messages in the vCenter for all hosts.

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.x Logical Design
• Analyze services to identify upstream and downstream service dependencies
• Navigate logical components and their interdependencies and make decisions based upon all service relationships

Let’s start with the second topic of this objective.

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.

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:

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). I think they also apply to the current version of the exam:

It is time for some words of wisdom, in regard to Exchange and the supported Active Directory environments. It is the same as with the supported. NET Framework releases: Latest release does not automatically mean “supported”.

To be honest: I nearly nuked a customer environment with ~ 300 users yesterday by preparing the domain for the first Windows Server 2019 Domain Controller.

This issue is described in KB2971270 and is fixed in Exchange 2013 CU6.

I published this blog post in July 2015 and it is still relevant. The feedback for this blog post was incredible, and I’m not joking when I say: I saved many admins weekends. ;) It has shown, that this error still occurs with Exchange 2016 and even 2019. Maybe not because of the same, with Exchange 2013 CU6 fixed bug, but maybe for other reasons. And the solution below still applies to it. Because of this I have decided to re-publish this blog post with a modified title and this little preamble.

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.

This blog post covers objective 1.3 (Determine risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions) 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 first objective of the exam prep guide has covered the business requirements. Now we have to do similar for the affected applications.

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:

A customer reported a weird problem with his NetScaler Gateway. Upon the first load of the website, they got an error “Cannot complete your request”. After clicking OK the error disappeared and does not occured again after reloading the website. Only after closing and re-opening the browser. I got this message in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not from a remote machine, e.g. my PC at the office.