It is pretty common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and Vembu has Vembu BDR Essentials.
Now Vembu has extended their Vembu BDR Essentials package significantly to address the needs of mid-sized businesses.
Affordable backup for SMB customers Most SMB virtualization deployments consists of two or three hosts, which makes 4 or 6 used CPU sockets.
Yesterday, I got one of these mails from a customer that make you think “Ehm, no”.
Can you please enable the TPM on all VMs.
The customer
The short answer is “Ehm, no!”. But I’m a kind guy, so I added some explanation to my answer.
Let’s add some context around this topic. The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a cryptoprocessor that offers various functions. For example, BitLocker uses the TPM to protect encryption keys.
Implementing a public key infrastructure (PKI) is a recurring task for me. More and more customers tend to implement a PKI in their environment. Mostly not to increase security, rather then to get rid of browser warnings because of self-signed certificates, to secure intra-org email communication with S/MIME, or to sign Microsoft Office macros.
What is a 2-tier PKI? Why is a multi-tier PKI hierarchy a good idea? Such a hierarchy typically consits of a root Certificate Authority (CA), and an issuing CA.
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.
Today, a customer called me and reported, on the first sight, a pretty weired error: Only Windows clients were unable to login into a WPA2-Enterprise wireless network. The setup itself was pretty simple: Cisco Meraki WiFi access points, a Windows Network Protection Server (NPS) on a Windows Server 2016 Domain Controller, and a Sophos SG 125 was acting as DHCP for different WiFi networks.
Windows clients failed to authenticate, but Apple iOS, Android, and even Windows 10 Tablets had no problem.
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.
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss.
Last week, a customer complained that he could not send emails with pictures with the native iOS email app. He attached three, four or five pictures to an emails, pushed the send button and instantly an error was displayed.
We checked the different connectors as well as the organizational limit for messages. The test mails were between 10 to 20 MB, and the message size limit was much higher.
The cross-check with Outlook Web Access indicated, that the issue was not a configured limit on one of the Exchange connectors.
To backup a virtual machine, Veeam Backup & Replication needs two permissions:
permission to access and backup the VM, as well as the permission to do specific tasks inside the VM to guarantee a consistent backup. The former persmission is granted by the user account that is used to access the VMware vCenter server (sorry for the VMW focust at this point). Usually, this account has the Administrator role granted at the vCenter Server level.
One of my customers bought a very nice new backup solution, which consists of a
HPE StoreOnce 5100 with ~ 144 TB usable capacity, and a new HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with Windows Server 2016 as new backup server. StoreOnce and backup server will be connected with 8 Gb Fibre-Channel and 10 GbE to the existing network and SAN. Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 U3a is already in use, as well as VMware vSphere 6.
As part of a maintenance job I had to update a 2-node Exchange Database Availability Group and a file-share witness server.
After the installation of Windows updates on the witness server and the obligatory reboot, the witness left in a failed state.
[PS] C:\Windows\system32>Get-DatabaseAvailabilityGroup -Identity DAG1 -Status | fl *wit* WARNING: Database availability group ‘DAG01’ witness is in a failed state. The database availability group requires the witness server to maintain quorum.
